The Skinny: More Nixonian Than Nixon
Trump’s Nixonian Week: April 24th-30th
Doxing, Revenge, and the Trump Regime’s Garcia Problem
What’s the very best way for the US government to convince people that their horrifying mass deportation campaign really is about protecting Americans from violence? How about exposing an American mother and her young special needs children to unhinged nazis in the Trump cult because Der Leader is big mad about all the terrible press one of his fascist theater shows has produced? In an act of profound petulance and cruelty that is very reminiscent of the Bush regime’s attempts to silence critics of the War on Terror, Trump’s Gestapo has literally doxed Abrego Garcia’s family for their father’s crime of uh, being unlawfully trafficked to a torture prison in El Salvador by mistake, apparently.
Abrego Garcia Family Flees to Safe House After Trump DHS Posts Home Address on Social Media
“The Trump administration has not only sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran megaprison due to an “administrative error” and so far refused to comply with a U.S. Supreme Court order to facilitate his return to the United States, but also shared on social media the home address of his family in Maryland, forcing them to relocate.
The news that Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, and her children were “moved to a safe house by supporters” after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted to X a 2021 order of protection petition that Vasquez Sura filed but soon abandoned was reported early Tuesday by The Washington Post.
“I don’t feel safe when the government posts my address, the house where my family lives, for everyone to see, especially when this case has gone viral and people have all sorts of opinions,” said Vasquez Sura. “So, this is definitely a bit terrifying. I’m scared for my kids.”
At this point we’ve all heard “the cruelty is the point” enough times that it’s become an internet catchphrase, but I am still consistently stunned by the Trump regime’s ability to find new and more appalling ways to lower the bar for pettiness and a lack of human decency. There is absolutely no way you’re ever going to convince me DHS and the White House didn’t just expose Garcia’s wife and children to the ire of Trump’s white nationalist base on purpose, and I think the lack of comment from the regime makes it clear that I’m right about that. These nazi chucklefucks have sent people on live television to lie and smear Sura’s husband as a gang leader, a dangerous criminal, and a terrorist to justify their fascist activities, so you’re damn right I believe they’d put Garcia’s family in danger to try and intimidate the folks fighting for his release – including of course, his wife and their children.
As I’ve mentioned before, the problem with nearly every Trump administration authoritarian operation is that they’re all a Russian nesting doll of fascist fuckery that start out wrong on the merits, and just get more outrageous and disconnected from reality as the situation evolves. The regime had no legal authority to traffic any of the men it sent to CECOT to a foreign torture prison for what appear to be mostly the civil violation of being in America without documentation; full stop. It doesn’t matter if they’re in a gang, even though most of them apparently weren’t. It doesn’t matter if they’re guilty of a criminal offense, even though most of them apparently weren’t. And it doesn’t matter if they were husband of the year, even though every family member that has come forward have all demanded the return of their loved ones. Deportation is a legal process that requires the government to prove they have a valid reason to remove a person from the country, and the defendant gets a chance to argue against that evidence. Whatever happened here, kidnapping brown men with tattoos to then traffic them to a torture prison in El Salvador, they weren’t deportations and they weren’t legal.
The kidnapping, trafficking and continued detention of Abrego Garcia however is even more outrageous and appalling because the government has already admitted multiple times in court that it was a mistake that never should have happened, even by the twisted fascist logic the regime is using to justify the rest of the “deportations.” Now after getting waxed multiple times in court, including by a 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court that sits three Trump-appointed judges, and launching a grotesque attempt to provoke a constitutional crisis over the matter, the regime is petulantly refusing to return Garcia to the United States; while seeking retribution for the indignity of being told they can’t do this fascist bullshit, by terrorizing Garcia’s wife and children.
Longtime readers will know that I’ve never had a problem admitting I’m a prison abolitionist. But if we’re going to have prisons whether I like them or not, then after reading and analyzing this story let me be the first to say Stephen Miller, Karoline Leavitt, and literally all the mutherfuckers in Trump’s DHS, should be in fucking prison right now. This nazi intimidation bullshit is outrageous and the word Nixonian doesn’t do the fascist fuckery on display here enough justice.
Strip Mining America as the World Burns
It’s honestly a little difficult to properly express how hard the Trump regime is leaning into its “villain in a Captain Planet cartoon” schtick in light of how quickly they’re working to gut environmental regulations, strip mine the country, and turn the planet to ash. Furthermore, you can tell rapidly accelerating us towards climate catastrophe for fun and profit is a real priority for the Kelpto Kaiser, his rich donors, and his fascist administration because of the extreme lengths the regime is willing to go to, in order to (not so) plausibly grant itself the power to do so.
Take for example the US Department of the Interior’s announcement that they’re going to fast track permit approvals for fossil fuel and mining projects on currently protected lands; and by “fast track” we mean reduce the length of the process to the point that the government is basically just rubberstamping mining projects. Their justification for doing so? Trump’s executive order declaring an “energy emergency” which the regime argues, grants them extraordinary powers to quickly strip mine national monuments, without consultation, and for reasons it doesn’t feel obligated to articulate clearly.
US interior agency to fast track permits for fossil fuel and mining projects
“The US interior department has announced plans to radically fast track permitting for projects involving fossil fuels and mining citing Donald Trump’s ‘energy emergency’ declaration that many experts say does not exist.
The move would reduce to a maximum of 28 days permitting procedures that previously could take multiple years, the department said late Wednesday.
Green groups immediately criticized the plans to boost planet-heating fossil fuels and questioned their legality describing them as an extreme change to the nation’s core environment laws.
The department said that reviews that now typically take around a year would be reduced to just 14 days while a full environment impact statement that usually took two years would now take less than a month.”
Obviously this is an extraordinarily bad idea for too many reasons to list fully here; not the least of which being that there is no energy emergency because the United States is already “extracting more oil and gas than any other country in world history.” On a boiling planet run by genocidal billionaires, the last damn thing anyone needs is the US government helping Trump’s fossil fuel industry donors extract more oil and gas that we shouldn’t be burning, out of the ground on federally protected lands. I’m not surprised environmental groups are planning to sue to stop this, and I hope they win; assuming court orders mean anything to this administration at all – it’s currently not clear that they do.
A moment must also be spared to note however that this is yet another example of Trump’s strategy to expand his executive powers in ways that fracture the rule of law, by declaring a bunch of made up national emergencies. At this point, I highly doubt that most Americans even know that the Trump administration has declared no less than 8 “national emergencies” to increase his power to do (mostly) fascist shit; that’s how often the regime has gone to this well. There is no more an “energy emergency” in America, than there is an “invasion” by “narco-terrorist gangs” occurring on our southern border. The regime is merely pretending these things are true, and pointing to Trump’s delusional edicts to justify enforcing this “unreality” as if they were true; but at the end of the day the Emperor really is bare ass naked, and reality isn’t a game of nazi Simon Says.
Weaponizing the State Against the Opposition Party
One of the problems with explaining America’s descent into a fascist dictatorship to people who aren’t particularly familiar with how fascist movements in history have operated, is that because the only frame of reference most folks who haven’t studied fascism have to operate from are fully-realized fascist dictatorships like the one Hitler constructed in Nazi Germany, they often can’t equate what they’re seeing, with what they understand fascism to be. They don’t realize that the erosion of our rights, and the establishment of one party authoritarian rule are almost invariably a process, and as such when you view an obviously fascist regime enacting that process in the same way fascists before them have done so, it’s a pretty good sign that they’re planning on reaching the same destination other politically-empowered fascist movements have arrived at.
I mention this because it is very clear to me that the Trump regime is working towards both rigging American elections permanently, and criminalizing its political opposition in any way possible. A good example of the latter situation might be Trump’s corrupt Department of Justice promising to prosecute Democratic Party elected officials who don’t cooperate with his mass deportation plot by letting ICE run roughshod over the cities and states they administer. A more subtle, but equally revealing example would be the announcement that Trump is ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to drum up an investigation into ActBlue, a fundraising platform used to support liberal and progressive political causes; which for the most part means getting Democrats elected to office.
‘Authoritarianism in Action’: Trump Orders DOJ Probe of Democratic Donation Platform ActBlue
“U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday launched his latest attack on political opponents by directing the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, a critical fundraising platform for Democrats and progressive organizations.
The order came in the form of a memorandum that the president signed shortly before heading to his Virginia golf course for a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser for MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC that has been accused of receiving illegal straw-donor contributions.
In his memorandum, Trump raised “concerns” about straw donations—when a donor makes a contribution through another person or entity—and directed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to “investigate allegations regarding the unlawful use of online fundraising platforms to make ‘straw’ or ‘dummy’ contributions or foreign contributions to political candidates and committees, and to take all appropriate actions to enforce the law.”
Trump’s memorandum cites a recent report from House Republicans accusing ActBlue of “a lack of commitment to stopping fraud.” ActBlue and House Democrats rejected the GOP findings at the time, calling the document “less of a report and more of a desperate effort to change the subject.”
Frankly most people who know about ActBlue are probably only aware of them because of the incessant emails they’ll send you once you’ve donated to any other fundraising campaign on their platform, but the reality that it’s the premier fundraising arm for both Trump’s liberal and progressive political opposition is pretty much the point here. As such I think Democrat leaders calling this another “distraction” need to take a walk outside and touch some grass, because this is clearly the Trump regime targeting its political enemies as part of an overall plan to essentially rig American politics.
We can talk till we’re all blue in the face about getting money out of politics, but when the fascist GOP can take full advantage of billionaire money because of Citizen’s United, and the Klepto Kaiser is simultaneously trying to shut down the political opposition’s small dollar donation apparatus because of a fake corruption scandal cooked up by the regime’s allies in Congress, you are looking at an obvious way for the nazis to put their thumb on the scale and thereby pre-determine the outcome of American elections. The fascists’ attempts to excuse all of this by pretending they’re trying to stop foreign straw donations, while celebrating the lawless rule of a man whose family is up to their eyebrows in Saudi bribe money, is just the crassly hypocritical cherry on top of this nazi shit-cake.
Talking Like a Nazi Won’t Defeat Trump
Well, I guess the Reaganite wing of the Dem Party isn’t going to stop declaring the best way to beat the fascists is to buck up and become more like them anytime soon, so criticizing Democratic Party boot-polishers trying to drive the party to the right in the middle of fascist takeover is a whole beat now. No matter how many times conservatives running the Democratic Party blow winnable elections to unhinged winger freaks, Third Way triangulation never dies; let’s wade into the muck.
Elissa Slotkin, who is basically what would happen if the DCU’s Amanda Waller took a mid-career detour to successfully run for a US Senate seat in Michigan, has been furiously working in the lab on a “brand new” way to fight Trump and the fascist GOP. Can you guess what this ex-CIA murderbot brain genius came up with? If you guessed “sacrifice marginalized people to the fascists and become more like the nazis” you can get in line to claim your gold star.
Slotkin is testing a ‘war plan’ to beat Trump. She wants Dems to ditch wokeness and muscle up
“Elissa Slotkin, the former CIA analyst turned battleground senator, will on Thursday start road-testing what she calls a “war plan” to “contain and defeat Donald Trump.”
In the first of a series of speeches about the Democratic Party’s path out of the wilderness, the Michigan senator said she will span everything from strategy to tactics and tone, acknowledging public perception of the party as “weak and woke” needs to change. She is urging Democrats to “fucking retake the flag” with appeals to voters’ sense of patriotism, to adopt “the goddamn Alpha energy” of Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell and to embrace an “airing out” of potential 2028 presidential candidates in a broadly contested primary.”
As an astute observer replied to another post I made about Slotkin’s plan: “anyone who says “wokeness” unironically is accepting the nazis’ terms and conditions.” Of course the beauty of the fascist right’s openly-broadcast plan to redefine “woke” as a brand wholly separate from its traditional meaning in African American communities is that now that “wokeness” has made its way into mainstreamed nazi propaganda, it means entirely different things to different demographics or groups of people. Needless to say however, a Democrat US Senator supposedly working in opposition to to the fascist Trump regime should not be talking about “ditching wokeness” at the precise time the ruling fascist party is defining caring about: constitutional rights, ICE kidnapping and attempting to deport political prisoners, and the right for trans people to exist, as “woke” – unless she *means* to imply the Democratic Party should shift rightward to mirror objectively fascist policies being enacted by that regime.
And hey, maybe that’s what she does mean! Slotkin is after all a self-described Zionist who expressed support for Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza even as the International Court of Justice was ruling they were conducting a plausible genocide of Palestinians there; so it’s not like she’s worried about getting a little blood on her hands. Slotkin also joined a festering cluster of Reaganite triangulators in the Democratic Party who’d like party members to stop using the word “oligarchy” because, and this is rich given the crowds folks like AOC and Bernie Sanders are attracting on their anti-oligarch speaking tour, Americans “don’t know what it means.”
Slotkin Panned Online After Claiming That Voters Don’t Know What ‘Oligarchy’ Means
“But even as evidence mounts that Americans understand that the political system has been captured by corporations and the wealthiest people—and are living their day-to-day lives with the results, including higher healthcare costs and disinvestment in public services—Slotkin told Politico on Thursday that Democrats should “stop using the term ‘oligarchy,’ a phrase she said doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions.”
So you got that kids? The way to beat fascism at the ballot box in elections that might literally be rigged for the nazis, is to stop fighting for the survival of marginalized people and never speak ill of the rich people that are turning your life into a dystopian sci-fi novel about emerging techno-fascism on a boiling planet.
The truth is however that there’s nothing special about Slotkin, Newsom, and Emanuel; in my now forty-eight years on this Earth this is exactly how monied people in the Democratic Party have reacted to every political tremor in modern US history. When your purpose is to get paid for serving the needs of wealthy ruling class donors, your solution to every problem is always going to be shift rightward and protect rich people; they don’t care at all that Trump is a fascist, just that their donor class maintains control of both major political parties in America. Which is probably why folks who think like them, have managed to lose not one but two separate elections to a reality TV show nazi oligarch whose catchphrase is literally “you’re fired.”
Like Newsome before her, Slotkin is peddling collaboration with a fascist as a realpolitik resistance; and she deserves the same response he got. Politely madam Senator? Go fuck yourself.
Regime Escalates Turf War Against the Judiciary
In studying media, news, and propaganda, there are moments in time when you realize that if things break the wrong way, you’re watching events that will live on in infamy in our collective history; this might be one of those moments. This morning Trump’s FBI arrested a sitting Wisconsin County Judge, Hannah Dugan, at the courthouse where she works; as revealed in an unhinged, since-deleted tweet by FBI Director and noted conspiracy crank Kash Patel. Unfortunately, the arrest has since been confirmed via multiple sources, and was discussed on Fox News earlier today by US Attorney General, Pam Bondi.
The government, which is currently being run by a bunch of Christian Nationalist freaks in a cult of personality who’re trying to build a white ethnostate, appears to be accusing Dugan of obstructing federal agents (so ICE) by allowing an undocumented immigrant to hide in her chambers and misdirecting the Gestapo goons coming to seize him. If even half of that turns out to be true, I accuse Justice Dugan of being a goddamn hero.
‘Fascism Getting Turned Up’ as Trump FBI Arrests Wisconsin County Judge
“Wisconsin state Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-19) said in a statement Wednesday that “several witnesses report that [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] did not present a warrant before entering the courtroom and it is not clear whether ICE ever possessed or presented a judicial warrant, generally required for agents to access nonpublic spaces like Judge Dugan’s chambers.”
Clancy continued:
I commend Judge Hannah Dugan’s defense of due process by preventing ICE from shamefully using her courtroom as an ad hoc holding area for deportations. We cannot have a functional legal system if people are justifiably afraid to show up for legal proceedings, especially when ICE agents have already repeatedly grabbed people off the street in retaliation for speech and free association, without even obtaining the proper warrants.
While the facts in this case are still unfolding, it’s clear that actions like Judge Dugan’s are what is required for democracy to survive the Trump regime. She used her position of power and privilege to protect someone from an agency that has repeatedly, flagrantly abused its own power. If enough of us act similarly, and strategically, we can stand with our neighbors and build a better world together.”
I quoted the part with Rep. Clancy’s statement both because I agree with every word of his defense of, and praise for Dugan’s actions, but also because I wanted to highlight the part about ICE not having a judicial warrant when they entered Dugan’s court. This is an extremely sore point for the fascist right and their mass deportation scheme and they’ve argued that all branches of the government, including the independent judiciary, should allow them to snatch up migrants with only immigration orders that are much easier to obtain for the Gestapo than judicial warrants are. Obviously many government officials and lawmakers with a conscience refuse to do so, Dugan appears to be unwilling to collaborate with a fascist regime’s mass deportation scheme, and that’s almost certainly why they’re charging her.
Furthermore, I think it’s safe to say the Trumpenreich is actively trying to intimidate judges who defy their mass deportation plans, while gearing up for a propaganda war about how courts that won’t let them do whatever they like to create a white ethnostate are somehow illegitimate, because of the extremely public show they’ve made of all this. Patel didn’t gleefully tweet the news out by accident, Bondi wasn’t just bumming around a Fox News camera when the news broke, and as the article notes standard procedure for charging a judge with obstruction would involve inviting her to “to show up and accept process” – not a highly public FBI arrest at the courthouse. This is another example of the Trump regime employing fascist theater to justify the enforcement of unreality; in this case their supposed right to arrest a Judge for stopping the American Gestapo from caging another undocumented immigrant because they didn’t have the paperwork to allow them to do so.
The perverse part here is that in an American legal logic twisted towards the needs of a reactionary ruling class and authoritarian principles, it’s entirely possible Dugan has committed a crime of some kind here. Be that as it may, the truth is that even if she has nobody has any right to say Justice Hannah Dugan is guilty. She’s not guilty, she might be the only one in the whole damn government who isn’t guilty. The guilty people are the fascists hunting down migrants and the greedbag “bipartisan” consensus that built them the fascist police state they’re using to do it. If you tell me that Hannah Dugan is guilty, then let me just say now that I don’t want to be innocent.
Note: as this story developed, I published an update on my Fediverse blog. Despite the sensationalist initial reports, the Trump regime is not accusing Dugan of hiding a migrant and his lawyer in her judicial chambers, but the government certainly is drumming up false obstruction charges to intimidate judges into letting ICE run roughshod over the law.
A Pattern of Behavior
A little over three months into the second Trump presidency, I think we can safely identify patterns in the way the regime is seeking to construct a patchwork dictatorship by asserting unprecedented powers under the executive branch through a variety of means. Part of this is a truly unhinged reading of Article II of the US Constitution that requires you to assume the drafters just decided to quill out the rest of the document for shits and giggles after granting absolute authority to the President. Part of this strategy is exercising rarely-used powers under the authority of very old laws in ways that they were never intended to be used and based on pretending fascist conspiracy theories are real. And finally part of it is that Trump has declared an unprecedented number of (fake) national emergencies to grant himself extraordinary powers; which of course the Kelpto Kaiser is using to straight up install a fascist dictatorship.
Trump Has Issued 8 “National Emergencies” Since Reentering the White House
“According to reporting from Axios, which relied on data collected by the Brennan Center for Justice, Trump has declared eight national emergencies since assuming office in mid-January. For comparison, President Joe Biden issued two national emergency declarations during his first 100 days in office, and President Barack Obama issued none within that time frame in either of his terms in office.
Trump has declared 21 national emergencies across his two terms so far — more than any other president this century, as the eight he announced this year, combined with the 13 he declared during his first four-year term, amount to 35 percent of all national emergencies declared by the four presidents since 2001. The next highest number of emergencies declared came from former President George W. Bush, who issued 16 such orders over the course of eight full years in office.
National emergencies allow presidents to temporarily enhance their executive powers without congressional approval. While Trump is not the first president to declare national emergencies to expand his authority, legal scholars say that he is exploiting such declarations to enact his far right agenda.”
One of the major ways I think mass media political discourse in the second Trump era has failed Americans, is the way mainstream analysts have been either unable, or unwilling to actively separate whether or not Downmarket Mussolini “can” do something, from whether or not he “should” do something. This isn’t a videogame; emergency presidential powers presupposes an actual emergency that justifies them or Trump is just stealing power for the executive branch and the media has a responsibility to report that because it’s part of the story. Yes, the President has the authority to declare a bunch of national emergencies, but that doesn’t mean we have to believe him when he makes up a bunch of fake crises and then insists that those fake crises give him the power to literally do fascism. What do I mean by fake crises? Well let’s take a look at some of the emergencies Trump has declared:
“Trump has issued national emergencies related to fossil fuel energy production, mineral drilling, additional militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, and the country’s economy, using the latter of those declarations to justify imposing tariffs on nearly every country on the globe. Despite some abuses of the law by multiple presidents, Trump’s actions have been much more numerous and noticeable, according to Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.”
Please keep in mind that this is in addition to the fake war he says we’re fighting against narco-terrorist gangs only his administration believes are working for Venezuela; as I’ve discussed elsewhere, this fake “invasion” and the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is more or less the legal basis for the Trumprenreich regime’s entire plan to traffic migrants to a torture prison in El Salvador, just to name one example.
Finally of course, our American political tragedy wouldn’t be complete if the reason Trump is getting away with all this wasn’t a function of GOP complicity, short-sightedness, and a terrible SCOTUS ruling:
“The National Emergencies Act of 1976 established more than 120 powers that presidents can use when declaring emergencies. Meant to empower the executive branch to respond to events that required faster response times than allowed for by the ordinary legislative process, the law also originally included a “legislative veto” on emergency decrees, to ensure presidents couldn’t abuse the law.
That veto, which only required a simple majority vote under the law, was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1983. To overturn a presidential national emergency order today would require the passage of a law, with a veto-proof two-thirds support in both houses of Congress.”
Somehow I don’t think Mike Johnson, John Thune and the rest of the fascist GOP is gonna stop the fascist president; but maybe I’m just getting cynical as I grow older.
Fighting Narco-Terrorism by Punishing Children
Over the course of both Trump administrations so far, I’ve always felt that one of the easiest ways to spot the odious fascist inclinations of the regime is to observe the Trumpenreich’s malevolent disdain for, and gleeful desire to harshly police migrant children. No matter how wrong a person is about immigration policy, there’s a demarcation of human decency line that should come into play before you decide to take out your nativist authoritarian fantasies on innocent children who’re in the United States through no real fault of their own; yet in Trumpworld that line simply doesn’t seem to exist.
Take for example the news that Trump’s DHS and the ICE Gestapo have been tracking “unaccompanied alien children” with an eye towards deporting or prosecuting them, under the guise of benevolent “wellness checks” and yet another far right conspiracy theory about child trafficking.
Ice seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children to deport or prosecute them
“Although DHS is characterizing the welfare visits as benevolent, an internal Ice document accessed by the National Immigration Project advocacy group and then shared shows Ice is also seeking out children who came into the US alone as immigrants – and their US-based sponsors – for immigration enforcement purposes and/or to pursue criminal prosecutions. The recent operations and document confirm a February report from Reuters, that the Trump administration has directed Ice to track down and deport this group.
Meanwhile, in Donald Trump’s second term, legal services provided to unaccompanied minors have been slashed and funds are not flowing despite court intervention. And the federal agency monitoring unaccompanied immigrant children has begun sharing sensitive data with Ice.
The Ice document shows “ it’s not just about checking in on kids, making sure that they can account for them and that they’re not being exploited”, said Michelle Méndez, the director of legal resources and training for the National Immigration Project. “It shows they have other goals, and the goals are criminalization of the kid or criminalization of the sponsor. It’s backdoor family separation.”
Look, I don’t know about you but I definitely remember a time when Americans were up in arms because Trump was separating migrant families in detention and essentially trafficking children to Christian American foster families. So for the Trump regime to be working on a backdoor way to deport unaccompanied migrant children under the guise of fighting a made up reactionary moral panic about stopping “child trafficking” under Joe Biden, is both nauseating and outrageous. I can think of dozens of more appropriate government agencies than DHS and ICE to monitor the welfare of what amount to child refugees, but it’s irrelevant because the Trump regime’s own internal documents say they picked the Gestapo because they want to deport literal children. I don’t know who needs to be told that a government pretending it cares about helping and protecting migrant children while simultaneously slashing all the programs that would actually do that is lying, but clearly that’s what’s going on here. These people are fucking heartless animals; and I don’t mean the kids.
It should also be noted that here again we can observe the same “inversion of purpose” the regime has been using to justify enacting other aspects of its authoritarian Christian Nationalist agenda; for example transforming the Department of Justice’s civil rights division into a vehicle for state prosecution of white grievance, or arguing that illegally kidnapping anti-genocide protestors on behalf of our bloodthirsty client state Israel is actually “fighting antisemitism on college campuses,” and so forth. I’m sure it amuses Stephen Miller, Trump’s unofficial Secretary of Nazi Shit, to no end that he’s able to weaponize the language of tolerance and equality to straight up do state-sanctioned white supremacist dictator shit and enforce mass acceptance of the regime’s fascist “unreality.”
Finally I would encourage folks not to sleep on the fact that ICE’s own internal documents are instructing agents to target, um, children with “gang or terrorist ties/activities.” Even setting aside the fact that the regime is implying literal children might be a national security threat or in a nacro-terrorist organization, we already know the Trumpenreich is prepared to accuse anyone they don’t particularly like of being in a terrorist gang so they can traffic them to a torture prison in El Salvador without due process. I can’t say why the regime wants to mark again, literal children, as narco-terrorists but given the fascist bullshit they’re already using that designation to accomplish, I can pretty much guarantee you it won’t be anything good.
Capitalism Is Killing Our Planet
One of the most frustrating things about explaining the origins of climate catastrophe in a free market fundamentalist society is getting people to understand that when I say “capitalism is causing climate crisis and will kill billions of people if we don’t end it,” I’m speaking quite literally. The evidence that capitalism itself, not just fossil fuels (although to be fair, capitalism and the wealth of the ruling class already depends on fossil fuels far more than you’ve been told) is the driving factor behind ongoing climate catastrophe is all around us; it’s just rarely reported on in context and with the level of focus and concern the issue deserves, in corporate media; an industry which for both professional and class reasons, remains pretty married to capitalism and free market fundamentalist ideology.
Take for example this recent Dartmouth University peer-reviewed study demonstrating that just 111 large corporations are responsible for 28 trillion (with a t) dollars worth of climate damage to our shared biosphere.
World’s Top 111 Corporations Have Caused $28T in Climate Damages, Study Finds
“In a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature last week, Dartmouth University researchers find that the global economy would be $28 trillion richer if extreme heat caused by climate emissions from the top 111 carbon majors had never happened. This is nearly the equivalent value of a year’s worth of all goods and services created in the U.S., as The Associated Press points out.
Ten top fossil fuel companies, including entities like Chevron, ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco, are responsible for half of those losses, the study finds.
The study authors say that their goal is to provide a scientific linkage between individual companies and financial losses due to their emissions, in hopes of bolstering efforts to hold polluters accountable for the climate crisis amid a growing wave of climate lawsuits and as more states and lawmakers pursue “polluter pays” laws.”
While to be quite honest with you I’m less than comfortable putting a dollar figure on what I know to be a plan to commit multiple genocides, I guarantee you that twenty-seven trillion is a bigger number than most of the people reading this can even comprehend; I know I can’t. Look, I don’t want to give people trying to do something useful to help achieve climate justice a hard time; this study is extremely revealing, even if it does adopt a capitalist framework to describe what is quite frankly mass fucking murder in slow motion. In my experience however studies like this have a rather large blind spot towards the human cost of conducting capitalism on a boiling planet where everything, including our governments, is owned by billionaire nazis, so it’s likely that these folks are actually underestimating the climate costs of “doing business” for the top corporations they studied.
The larger point here however is that as a society we have already amassed oodles of definitive proof that capitalists are burning the planet and threatening billions of lives for profit, and that evidence is typically only worth a paragraph-long notice in our corporate media publications. Rich people are killing us, billions of us, they’re just doing it slowly; that’s not a metaphor, and I am being dead serious with you when I say that either capitalism goes, or a planet that can support eight billion people does. Clearly the free market fundamentalists who run our nations on behalf of an obscenely wealthy billionaire ruling class, aren’t coming to the rescue; because the rich people who own them have already made their choice. They’re clearly going to slaughter billions of people to keep doing capitalism; the question then becomes – do we as a species intend to let them?
- Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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