The Skinny: Banality of Evil in Trump’s America

 

Everything They Do Might Kill You: May 24th – May 31st

 

GOP Budget Bill Also a Death Sentence for Trans Americans

In writing about the homicidal class war budget reconciliation bill House Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republican Party just voted to send to the senate, it’s important to understand that these nazi assclowns are doing a lot more than just murdering the poor to enrich the oligarch class. The so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is also an active attempt to covertly enact vast portions of the larger Trumpenreich’s fascist, or Christian nationalist agenda. Nested inside the Big Billionaire Bill, we’ve already uncovered a GOP plot to defang judicial oversight over Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional mass deportation campaign for example, and now observers have exposed another last minute change that would deny gender affirming care to, and likely cause the forced detransition of, hundreds of thousands of transgender Americans. This is nothing less than an assault on the very existence of trans people in the United States, but it remains largely unclear if a bipartisan establishment entertaining disingenuous, scientifically debunked propaganda about women’s scholastic athletics and trans youth in general, cares to highlight that reality in our discourse before we’re putting bodies in the ground.

Republicans Launch Midnight Attack on Health Care Access for Trans Americans

“Late Wednesday, Congressional Republicans amended the bill to prohibit the use of Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care, potentially ripping healthcare access away from hundreds of thousands of transgender Americans.

An earlier version of the legislation targeted Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care for minors. In a midnight-hour maneuver, Republicans removed the word “minors” from that provision, prohibiting the use of Medicaid funding for “gender-transition procedures” for children as well as adults.

The legislation broadly defines “gender-transition procedures” as everything from surgery to hormone therapy. It needs only a simple majority to pass the Senate.

Experts on transgender health care said that if this provision advances, it could make an already-dire landscape for transgender care significantly worse. They described devastating consequences for the hundreds of thousands of transgender Americans who rely on Medicaid that will be further compounded by the roughly $700 billion in cuts to the health program in the GOP bill.”

For the past three years, and in response to a dangerous shift in rhetoric and tactics by the fascist Pig Empire right, I’ve been trying to explain to cis het people that Trump and the GOP’s anti-trans policies are unquestionably part of a larger anti-trans pogrom designed to eliminate or otherwise end by any means possible, the existence of trans people in America. The accuracy of that analysis was demonstrated on day one of Downmarket Mussolini’s second term as President when Der Leader issued an executive order declaring there were only two legally recognized “biological sexes” in America; thereby decreeing that trans people effectively don’t exist. This should have been a massive wake up call for cis people who don’t want tens of thousands of dead trans people, particularly trans women, on their hands, because historically when a state says that you do not exist, it’s because they mean to make it so.

Unfortunately, this warning, which was also supported by multiple leaked GOP and far right strategy sessions in which elected Republican politicians and think tank minions openly admitted their ultimate goal is ending trans care in American entirely, and Donald Trump’s repeated public campaign promises to do the same, has largely gone unheeded; particularly by a Democrat establishment much more interested in blaming Harris’s 2024 US election loss on her utterly nonexistent defense of trans rights. Well folks, we’re here in the exact place I always told you would be arrive at; politically empowered transphobe nazis in the Republican Party are attempting to force detransition, or outright eliminate labor class trans people in our society. Short of a SCOTUS decision that would rival Dred Scott v. Sandford in its odiousness, this is the worst case scenario, and my only question for wise centrists and affluent liberals who have insisted Trump’s political opposition should actively avoid taking about the ongoing anti-trans pogrom for electoral purposes is, “what now?”

Please don’t accuse me of hyperbole because the fact is this article doesn’t even come close to properly articulating what a horrifying development this is for both trans people, and anyone who doesn’t want to live under a fascist dictatorship where a reality TV show nazi President gets to decide who has a right to merely exist. The Republican Party knows full well that the US Constitution and international human rights law will make it extremely difficult to just round up trans people in concentration camps to force detransition them and start murdering folks, so they’ve settled on a subtler but no less homicidal strategy. The fascist right is thus working to eliminate gender affirming care for trans people entirely, while threatening anyone who employs or financially supports trans people as part of a larger effort to drive us out of the work force. These guys know all about the mental health problems and suicide rate increases brought on by untreated gender dysphoria, community isolation, and poverty; in fact, they’re counting on it to allow them to wipe out trans people without getting any blood directly on their hands as they let “nature take its course.”

Of course, I expect this warning to once again fall on the deaf ears of Very Serious People TM in the American liberal establishment, where transphobia runs almost as rampant as it does inside GOP war rooms. Who cares if labor class trans people die without gender affirming care when the point here is to signal to suburban white crackers who will never vote for you that you’re just as anti-trans as the Pork Reich, right?

 

Trump’s Migrant Trap Is Still Fascism

One of the peculiar aspects of analyzing America’s descent into overt fascism during the second Trump administration is the way frustration with liberal orthodoxy surrounding the effectiveness of “rules and norms” in curtailing governmental abuses of power, and the blatantly unlawful behavior the regime regularly engages in, have worked to tamp down criticism of all the awful things this administration does that are merely morally wrong while still being entirely legal. Of course it is completely rational to ask why Trump’s predecessors in government considered relying on tradition and “norms” to prevent abuses of executive branch power a viable plan in the first place, but that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t criticize the regime for doing objectively fascist cracker bullshit to punish “enemies” of the white American Volk just because it’s not strictly illegal. Take for example ICE’s recent habit of occupying courtrooms with immigration agents, and coordinating with government lawyers to allow the detainment and expedited deportation of otherwise law-abiding migrants, effectively without due process.

ICE Agents Are Camped Outside Immigration Courts to Make Arrests

“Reports began circulating on social media on Tuesday that ICE had begun efforts to get cases dismissed that had been pending for less than two years so that the agency could immediately apprehend immigrants and force them into an expedited removal process — effectively side-stepping the typical immigration court process.

“They’re moving to end those cases so they can move forward with a more aggressive form of deportation without the requirement to see a judge or request asylum,” Mackler said. “They’re basically circumventing due process.”

Although it’s not clearly explained in this article, what’s going on here is that the Trump regime has revived a 2019 policy that allows them to fast track deportations for migrants who can’t prove they’ve been in the United States for longer than two years. This has then been combined with an ICE guidance issued in January that allows agents to conduct operations near courthouses “discreetly,” and active complicity by government attorneys, to create a cruel but effective trap. Migrants, even potential asylum seekers, can show up in court for their immigration cases, watch the government dismiss the charges, and then be detained for expedited deportation by masked Gestapo goons lounging around in the courtroom hallways for that purpose. Or, they can choose to skip the hearing, which will allow for immediate ICE detention and an automatic deportation order. Either way, the Trump regime gets to deport migrants without anything even resembling due process. Furthermore, just in case you think I’m being uncharitable and this is all just an unhappy accident caused by the interaction of shortsighted policy decisions, recent reporting in The Guardian indicates that this police state bullshit is entirely intentional on the part of the US Government.

Ice arrests at immigration courts across the US stirring panic: ‘It’s terrifying’

“Three US immigration officials told the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity that government attorneys were given the order to start dismissing cases when they showed up for work on Monday, and were aware that federal agents would then be able to arrest those individuals when they left the courtroom.

In the case of Serrano in Miami, the request for dismissal was delivered by a government attorney who spoke without identifying herself on the record, the Associated Press reported. She refused to provide her name to the AP and quickly exited the courtroom.”

Unfortunately, as far as I know and as I alluded to at the top of this post, this “tactic” to help facilitate an obviously white nationalist mass deportation scheme is completely legal. In fact, as this very article notes the Biden regime was using a similar expedited deportation process to rapidly deport migrants who’d been in the United States for less than two weeks, so in a round about way this is yet another example of America’s long embrace of foundationally racist, xenophobic, and nativist immigration policies paving the way for Trump, a would-be fascist dictator, to circumvent the law and US constitution to do white nationalist authoritarian repression. Of course Biden wasn’t sending masked goon squads full of Proud Boys with an immigration badge to trap migrants actively trying to obey US immigration law, and therein lies the rub. Just because America’s long embrace of fascism, white supremacy, and police state repression allows Trump to do something, doesn’t mean we have to pretend that he should do that thing, or that it’s perfectly fine when he does so. This is fascism, legal or otherwise.

 

State Harassment and “Crimes” Against Whiteness

Can anyone in the entire country tell me what it’s going to take for corporate media in America to call the obviously racist things the Trump administration is doing, racist? At this point, I think the degree to which bald-faced racial animus and white nationalist ideology obviously helps form the very core of what the Trump regime does on a day to day basis, makes it ridiculously irresponsible not to discuss the open white supremacy underpinning those actions when reporting on them. While we’re all aware that Donald Trump and the vast majority of his administration are committed racists, that doesn’t change the fact that when politically-empowered racists start devoting the immense power of the state to prosecuting white grievance, and re-establishing an ethno-nationalist legal, political, and social order, that should be front page news no matter how many times it has already come up before.

To understand what I’m talking about, consider the relative lack of media uproar about the announcement that Trump’s Department of Justice is launching what’s effectively an “anti-Affirmative Action or DEI” investigation into the Black Democrat Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson for literally hiring Black people, in a minority majority city.

Justice Department to investigate Chicago after mayor’s remarks about hiring Black officials

“The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said Monday that it was opening an investigation into the city of Chicago after Mayor Brandon Johnson’s comments Sunday highlighting prominent Black officials in his administration.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote in a letter to Johnson posted on X that she had “authorized an investigation” into whether Chicago is “engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination” following Johnson’s remarks at a church Sunday.

“If these kind of hiring decisions are being made for top-level positions in your administration, then it begs the question of whether such decisions are also being made for lower-level positions,” Dhillon wrote.

Johnson said in remarks at Apostolic Church of God that the deputy mayor, the chief operations officer, the budget director and others are all Black people. Johnson said some of his detractors criticize him by saying the only thing he talks about “is the hiring of Black people.”

“No, what I’m saying is when you hire our people, we always look out for everybody else,” he said.”

Alright so bear with me for a moment because the amount of racist petulant adult baby shit going on here is significant, and I’m not sure the quoted passage does it justice. The (un)Civil Rights division of Trump’s Justice Department is investigating the Mayor of Chicago for crimes against whiteness because he highlighted the effectiveness of hiring Black people in a city that’s roughly 65% non-white, and 30% Black, while speaking at a Black majority church. In other words, the United States government is now spending time and money to investigate what normal people would call “political campaigning” under the guise of fighting the wholly made-up scourge of “reverse racism.”

As if the openly cracker nationalist nature of this entire episode weren’t appalling enough however, the fascist Trump regime is also factually wrong about the idea that Johnson’s hiring shows a pro-Black bias at all. That’s not an opinion, it’s a question of numbers; the article above goes on to note that the announcement of this investigation comes despite the raw demographic data showing only a slim majority of Black employees among the Mayor’s Office staff.

“According to the mayor’s office, white and Black employees are a majority of staff members, with 30.5% of employees identifying as white and 34.3% identifying as Black.”

So, the Trump administration is harassing the Mayor of a majority-minority city winger racists have been demonizing for years, because Johnson hired a staff that looks more or less like the community he serves, demographically. Of course there’s a little more backstory here, because Mayor Johnson has been critical of Trump’s racism and racist policies; to which any rational person should probably respond “well, good for him; at least he got something right given how poorly his tenure as Mayor has gone.” The reality however is that someone inside the Trump regime heard a Black Mayor brag about hiring Black leaders in his administration at a Black Church and decided that was probably a race crime against whiteness. Normally, the story would end there, with a note that “crackers believe the weirdest shit” but because this is a white nationalist government prepared to move heaven and earth to prosecute white grievance, here we are.

I sincerely hope the reason media minions are missing the point of this story isn’t that Trump sent out an Indian-American official to announce this racist investigation targeting Johnson; we’re far too late in the game for “but they have a minority friend” to carry water. Maybe folks don’t want to talk about Brandon Johnson because he’s a bad Mayor, who ran as a progressive, and has more or less let down all the people who brought him to power in Chicago. That’s fair, but when the Trump administration is using the Department of Justice to target its political opposition for blatantly racist reasons, Very Serious People TM in the discourse could at least use that story as an opportunity to stop equivocating about whether or not these guys really are cracker nazis, doing cracker nazi shit.

 

Student Visas and the Fascist Panopticon

Creeping into the fifth month of the second Trump era, diligent observers are starting to identify patterns in how the Pork Reich operates to prosecute the regime’s fascist agenda. While it’s certainly true that the administration’s assault on judicial oversight, civil rights legislation, and efforts to consolidate power in the executive branch are being conducted at blinding speed, there are still a couple of key elements of deception they’re relying on to accomplish their odious goals. Let’s talk about both.

First, the majority of orders issued from this administration, be they executive orders from the President, or internal guidance and instructions within departments in the government, are written in an intentionally vague manner that allows for a broad interpretation of who the government can target for repression and how. This creates plausible deniability for a Trump regime and larger fascist Republican Party that has no problem openly lying into a camera about what they’re trying to do, and seemingly paralyzes a corporate media that remains uncomfortable drawing the obvious broader conclusions brought up by everything Trump and his minions do and say. Given how broadly the regime interprets terms like “invasion,” “emergency,” and “terrorist” however, I think its a public disservice to assume anything a Pork Reich edict would allow, isn’t something this administration is prepared to try given the right circumstances.

The second method of deception deployed by the regime to forward its fascist agenda, is to break up schemes, plots, and proposals that would likely generate a tremendous amount of public outrage, into a number of smaller rules, edicts, or guidelines that when taken together still accomplish the same level of fascist repression and state targeting. This allows the overall authoritarian projects the regime is attempting to conduct, to slip by under the public’s radar until such a time as the small rule changes add up to allow the Pork Reich to do the enormous fascist bullshit they’re trying to accomplish in the long run. A good example of this process in action can be found in the way the Trump regime has effectively justified a mass surveillance program targeting foreign students and scholars, while simultaneously seizing control of the student visa process at the embassy level; presumably to conduct fascist ideological screening away from the prying eyes of critics.

Trump Administration Orders Pause on All New Student Visa Interviews

“The State Department cable does not specifically state what the expanded social media screening will look for, although it alludes to President Donald Trump’s executive orders aimed at combating terrorism and antisemitism.

Trump’s January 29 order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism” authorizes the deportation of noncitizen students and others who took part in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians and is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced the launch of a task force to surveil immigrants’ social media posts, including those of around 1.5 million foreign students, for alleged antisemitism. While DHS did not say how antisemitism would be defined, critics note that the Trump administration has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition, which conflates opposition to Zionism—the settler-colonial movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine—with hatred of Jews.

Earlier this year, the State Department also launched a controversial artificial intelligence-powered “catch and revoke” program to cancel the visas of international students deemed supportive of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

Rubio has invoked Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to designate for deportation pro-Palestine international students who the government admits committed no crimes.”

I think this story is the perfect example of the paint by numbers process Trump is employing to install a fascist dictatorship in America because it touches on both primary types of deception the regime is employing to do so. The announcement that US embassies would summarily halt student visa interviews in anticipation of a vastly expanded social media screening and vetting process of all foreign student applicants must be understood as part of a larger process by which the regime has established a digital panopticon for foreign students studying and residing in the US; ostensibly to “fight antisemitism” which we know means targeting critics of US foreign policy, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or the Trump regime more broadly. As more and more of this panopticon springs into being one government declaration at a time, the constitutionally guaranteed rights of the targeted group become less and less relevant to a fascist regime with the apparatus necessary to violate them at will and let the courts object later. At this point if you’re a foreign student on US soil, you’re already living under a form of surveillance state fascism and reactionary ideological policing.

Which brings us to the vague wording, and potentially broad applications of this ideological screening. As we’ve learned to watch for from studying the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, and the Trump administration’s clear adherence to its doctrines, there is nothing in any of the administration’s orders targeting dissidents that essentializes being pro-Palestine, or anti-genocide. The regime has already asserted the power to define anything as terrorism, or material support, and even casual criticism as being a threat to US national security, so why would they stop at anti-genocide protestors or foreign students at all for that matter? A vast digital panopticon relying on “AI-processing” technology to sort through every aspect of a targeted individual or group’s lives can and almost certainly will be repurposed to identify and surveil the regime’s political and ideological opposition in broader American society until such a time as a ghoul like Marco Rubio, or Pam Bondi finds a way to declare that their constitutional rights too, are null and void.

All of which leaves one obvious question. Is anyone in America even noticing the monstrous repressive machinery of state our government is building, activating, or repurposing here, or is our society too awash in anti-student, anti-protest, pro-genocide propaganda to hear alarm bells when the people the nazis come for first are pro-Palestine activists?

 

GOP Megabill Is White Nationalist Too

Friends and cherished readers, it is with great regret that I must inform you that we have not yet hit bottom in exploring what a terrible fascist piece of legislation the absurdly-named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” actually is. I’ve written a lot about the homicidal class war nature of the bill House Republicans voted for in the dead of night, and on those grounds alone this would probably be one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern history to become law, if it survives a GOP-controlled US Senate reasonably unaltered. Because political-empowered fascists on a mission from “God” to create a techno-fascist dystopia can literally always make everything shittier however, the budget reconciliation bill is also a round about way for the fascist Republican Party to enshrine several of its key authoritarian policy objectives into law. I’m a little late to the party, but I’d like to talk a bit about the bill’s proposed changes to immigration policy and funding, because I think it exposes how the absurdly-named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is as much a vehicle to prosecute a white nationalist policy agenda, as it is a piece of budget legislation that openly robs the American labor class on behalf of uber-wealthy oligarchs.

Using this May 17th, 2025 article from The Guardian, I want to focus in on two key areas of discussion here: funding, and ethno-nationalist policy. For clarity’s sake however, I’m going to look at them in the opposite order they’re presented in the article, starting with funding.

US House Republicans propose fees on immigrants to fund Trump’s crackdown

“More than $50bn is allocated in the legislation to construct a wall along the border with Mexico, as well as fortifications elsewhere. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) will receive $45bn for detention facilities, $14bn for its deportation operations and billions of dollars more to hire 10,000 new agents by 2029.”

This is the most straightforward part of the bill’s odious support for Trump’s fascist mass deportation scheme; and since it actually deals with allocating funds, this is the part you’re supposed to put in a budget reconciliation bill. Frankly speaking however there is nothing appropriate about spending $50B on a border wall we know won’t “work” to keep out migrants and as recently as five years ago at least one side of the US political establishment recognized would be a grotesque monument to American nativism; a formerly partisan principle that tragically seems to have fallen by the wayside in the Democratic Party’s desperate quest to court suburban cracker voters in the lead up to an election they’d go on to lose anyway. Given that Trump is already using ICE as his white nationalist Gestapo, does anyone who isn’t a raging nazi think it’s a good idea to let DHS hire ten thousand more ICE goons? Whose interests does it actually serve to hand $45B to private prison contractors, and budget another $14B for fascist mass deportations? Please keep in mind here that you can’t divorce these expenditures from the massive cuts to social safety net programs specifically targeting the American labor class; in addition to murdering people for bonus billionaire yacht money, the GOP is saying that your kids should go hungry and poor people should hop in the woodchipper so Trump can get back to building his absurd and racist border wall.

As disgusting as all of that is however, the real kicker here is the way the proposed budget bill works to create a de facto, albeit loose, white nationalist ban on immigration, through the application of unprecedented fees for sponsors of would-be immigrants and asylum seekers; essentially putting access to legal immigration and even asylum claims processes behind a real life paywall.

“Heidi Altman, vice-president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said the new fees appeared targeted at the sorts of immigrants that the Trump administration has prioritized keeping out, such as asylum seekers, who arrived in large numbers during Joe Biden’s term.

“It’s part of the administration’s assault on humanitarian protections for immigrant communities,” Altman said. “This is an entire new way of thinking about fees as a penalty, essentially, for an immigrant status.”

Under the bill, immigrants would have to pay $1,000 to apply for asylum, $100 to keep an application active each year as it makes it through the overburdened immigration system, and $550 for a work permit. People requesting humanitarian parole to enter the United States would have to pay $1,000, and abused or neglected children who qualify for a program called Special Immigrant Juvenile Status would have to pay $500. Immigration cases can take a long time to resolve in court, but if a defendant asks a judge for a continuance, they would have to pay $100 each time.

These fees do not exist under current law, and the bill specifies they cannot be waived in almost all circumstances.”

Look folks, the “both sides” muppets in our discreetly white supremacist media aren’t going to grapple with what this bill does because they’re terrified of being sued by the Klepto Kaiser, but this is pretty obviously some cracker nazi shit. Through word and deed, Trump has openly indicated that the types of immigrants he wants are whiter and wealthier, than the types of immigrants he considers and invasion. By putting un-waivable and arduous fees on even asylum processes, the regime is actively working to screen out migrants from poorer, browner countries in the global South in a way that won’t immediately be flagged as illegal ethno-nationalist bullshit in the larger discourse; because newsflash, America is kinda racist. Practically speaking however, this is an attempt to enshrine Trump’s project to whiten America into law, by abusing the budget reconciliation process. There is literally no way a law like this would make its way through Congress on its own, but weaved inside a budget reconciliation bill that might be the only piece of significant legislation this Republican-controlled congress is able to pass, it barely seems to have registered in a public discourse awash in bipartisan, anti-migrant propaganda.

 

Dems Can Block the Budget Bill. Will They?

Given what I’ve already written about the GOP’s homicidal class war budget, I think everyone who isn’t a nazi, a billionaire, or both can readily agree that anyone in a position to stop this monstrous theft and murder bill from getting through the US Senate and becoming law, should definitely do that; including and perhaps especially elected officials in the opposition Democratic Party. The problem of course being that due to the budget reconciliation process, and the Republican majority in the Senate, it hasn’t looked like there is anything the Democrats can do to stop this bill from passing if GOP Senators work up the courage to murder their own voters for Trump and his broligarch masters; until now.

What if I told you that in their arrogance and haste to turn the planet to ash for extractivist donors, Republicans have made a potentially-fatal mistake that would allow Senate Democrats to run out the clock on this Congress and prevent a floor vote on the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” or for that matter any other legislation Trump and the GOP wanted to pass into law between now and at least the 2026 US midterm elections? Is that something you’d want Democratic Party politicians to do, even understanding that the price of admission is fully breaking a US Senate that the GOP just smashed itself?

If your answer to that last question is yes, get ready to start phoning Senators, because noted policy nerd David Dayen says its possible, and the Democratic Party already knows so.

Senate Democrats Have Been Handed a Tool to Stop the Big Beautiful Bill

“Only executive branch agency rules can be overturned by a CRA resolution, and only within 60 legislative days after being presented to Congress, in an up-or-down vote that avoids the Senate filibuster. The Senate parliamentarian, joining the auditors at the Government Accountability Office, said that the EPA waivers were not “rules” as defined by the CRA, and therefore couldn’t be put into a resolution. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), in a communication he sent last Congress about these very EPA waivers, agreed that the “federal preemption waivers cannot be reviewed under the Congressional Review Act.”

Yet Senate Republicans said, “Tough, we’re doing it anyway.” And Lee voted with them.

California has already announced that it will sue to maintain its waiver, charging that the Senate had no authority to overturn it. But the Senate operates largely on precedent, and now that the parliamentarian has been disregarded on this point, virtually any action the executive branch takes could be construed as a rule, and therefore subject to fast-track congressional review.

For this reason, Democrats could subject the Senate to time-consuming resolution votes repeatedly, to such a degree that the Senate would not have time to do anything else for the rest of this session of Congress. In other words, Democrats could respond to the waiver vote by paralyzing the Senate, and stopping the giant Trump tax bill from ever reaching the floor.”

Unfortunately this article is absolutely civics major wonk shit and if you’re not familiar with the internal mechanics of the US government and Senate rules in particular, it might be a bit of a slog to get through. The important point to understand here is that any alteration of executive branch agency rules, can be used to trigger a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution with the support of only thirty Senators, which triggers an automatically-mandated ten hours of debate and a vote, and all of that must be conducted before further Senate business can proceed. Normally this would only affect a very narrow number of situations that come before the US Senate, but the GOP just voted to affirm that almost anything they don’t like can be considered an executive branch agency rule, so they could fuck over California emission standards; due to the magic of precedent, that opens up the option for thirty Senate Democrats to bring forward a potentially endless number of CRA resolutions and literally freeze the government in place.

That means no floor vote to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or for that matter anything else Trump and the GOP want to ram through the Senate either. It wouldn’t stop Trump from trying to rule via executive order, but it would render the entire Republican federal government a gridlocked body with no legislative power, with Senate Democrats who presumably oppose a fascist dictatorship in charge of whether or not the business of government can move forward or not, at any given point. As Dayen makes clear, the GOP has effectively unleashed the kraken.

“The bottom line is this: If you found something like 1,000 current or former agency actions—a reasonable number considering all the work executive branch agencies do—you would probably have enough to keep the Senate debating and voting on CRA resolutions through the duration of this Congress.

That means the Senate would never have the ability to take up executive branch or judicial nominations, or legislation like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that recently passed the House. Senate Democrats could put the chamber into permanent gridlock, and thereby save 14 million people from losing their Medicaid coverage, save millions more from loss of SNAP benefits, while also forcing the 2017 Trump tax cuts to expire. That’s the level of hardball that can be played here.”

So, I guess the only question left here is are Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats prepared to go nuclear if it’ll save perhaps millions of labor class lives? Maybe the better question is if they aren’t, what good are they to us in a fascist America where everyone is next on the firing line?

 

Climate Crisis and the Genocide in Gaza

In writing about a climate crisis riven by extractivist capitalism, one thing I’ve tried to stress is the reality that to whatever degree carbon emissions are an individual consumption driven problem, climate catastrophe is, inarguably, caused to a vastly greater degree by the activities of large corporations, capitalist governments, and the rich people who own them. I say this not because actively addressing climate crisis wouldn’t involve lifestyle changes for the broader population, particularly in the global north, but to remind you that even if every labor class person on this planet took steps to minimize their carbon footprint, the ecological impacts of capitalist activity and the imperialism that supports it in the Pig Empire would still cook us all like barbecue; addressing climate crisis, requires addressing the carbon emissions of these large institutional actors, which in turn likely represents the death of capitalism itself to be effective. More to the point, our ruling class oligarchs and the politicians they control absolutely know this, but would prefer to shift blame onto an amorphous “public.” Fossil Fuel companies and corporate polluters aren’t paying to push “personal consumption” propaganda on a boiling planet for no reason, after all. Worse still, in talking about addressing climate crisis on an individual level in the mainstream discourse, there is a tendency for pro-capitalist pundits to completely ignore the knock on effects of activities conducted by large-scale capitalist actors and states that clearly do rapidly accelerate the human species towards mass extinction; the most obvious of which is the conduct of war and military operations in perpetual preparation for future undefined wars.

As an anarchist, anti-imperialist, and committed peacenik who knows only rich men and weapons contractors benefit from the wars they demand labor class people die in, I’m pretty much against war and militarization as a matter of course. But the reality is by some measurements the US military is literally the largest polluter on the planet, and despite the fact that we can all see the roaring fighter jets, exploding rockets, and smoke rising from the wreckage during every major modern conflict, until recently nobody in our establishment discourse was prepared to consider that this might be making global warming worse and the (presumed) fight against climate crisis harder. This matters, and for years I’ve been practically begging readers to pay more attention to a problem I am absolutely certain the pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist American media establishment is ignoring on purpose.

As such it was a bittersweet moment when I ran across this Guardian article about a carbon footprint study conducted on the first 15 months of Israel’s US-backed genocide targeting Palestinians in Gaza.

Carbon footprint of Israel’s war on Gaza exceeds that of many entire countries

“The carbon footprint of the first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza will be greater than the annual planet-warming emissions of a hundred individual countries, exacerbating the global climate emergency on top of the huge civilian death toll, new research reveals.

A study shared exclusively with the Guardian found the long-term climate cost of destroying, clearing and rebuilding Gaza could top 31m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e). This is more than the combined 2023 annual greenhouse gases emitted by Costa Rica and Estonia, yet there is no obligation for states to report military emissions to the UN climate body.

Israel’s relentless bombardment, blockade and refusal to comply with international court rulings has underscored the asymmetry of each side’s war machine, as well as almost unconditional military, energy and diplomatic support Israel enjoys from allies including the US and UK.”

The back of the napkin story here is that Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s attempts to broaden the conflict with operations in Lebanon, is pumping out enough carbon to qualify as a moderately-sized industrial nation in its own right; at the precise time global carbon emissions are boiling the planet and driving what many scientists say is an already ongoing mass extinction event. Israeli military operations are responsible for the vast majority of this carbon output, which in turn means that a US government arming and funding the IOF as it conducts a genocide, is also responsible. While a capitalist-controlled international order will never recognize the truth, the reality is that these too are crimes against humanity; in addition to the obscene number of recognized crimes against humanity Israel is committing during its genocide in Gaza. We are all paying for these atrocities with more than tax dollars and our shared humanity, because of decisions made by oil-drenched greedbag murderbots who claim to be acting in our collective best interests.

As bleak as this report is however, its very existence still inspires a flicker of hope in my weary heart. If climate crisis and the rise of genocidal fascism across the Pig Empire and its client states have done nothing else, they have made it abundantly clear that the fight against climate catastrophe is a struggle against imperialism, capitalism, and fascism all at the same time. The violence and exploitation Pig Empire corpse farmers have wrought abroad, is now returning home to the imperial core at the precise time as the whole monstrous capitalist order is rending the world asunder in very literally ways. All paths lead to the same destinations, all our struggles are now as one.

“The research, published by the Social Science Research Network, is part of a growing movement to hold states and businesses accountable for the climate and environmental costs of war and occupation, including the long-term impact damage to land, food and water sources, as well as post-conflict clean-up and reconstruction.”

You’re not crazy, and we are not alone. Now, what do we do about it?