Trump dreams of his own Kafkaesque penal colony, a place where he can ship the accused without the trouble of a trial, a place where the imprisoned have no chance to defend themselves and, in fact, may not know why they are condemned or how they can find their way out, if there is a way out. Trump’s Devil’s Island is the death-haunted country of El Salvador. If Trump is the crude Commandant, Nayib Buekele is his dutiful Officer, eager to perform any act of depravity to please his superior…for a price ($20,000 a person). The Travelers have been sent away from this prison state, denied any inspection of its torture chambers. 

The contradictions of life in late-capitalist America under Trump: Most Americans want the return of manufacturing jobs to the US, as long as they don’t have to work them. But they simultaneously support the mass deportation of those who are willing to work near the blast furnaces and on the assembly lines.

Trump and Rubio would have deported Tom Paine for writing seditious pamphlets as a “citizen of the world” and not the US. As it was, Paine died a pariah in the country he did so much to liberate, condemned as a heretic and Jacobin. Only six people attended his funeral in New York City, and the great radical essayist William Cobbett felt compelled to sail over to the States, dig up his bones, and take them back to the UK because the US had betrayed Paine’s vision for the country and its own revolution.

If the Trump team was going to “accidentally” include any reporter in their Yemen war planning–Goldberg, the former IDF prison guard–would be the one. It’s the equivalent of Christopher Hitchens being invited to the Bush White House to help plot airstrikes on Mosul and Fallujah. But if, as MAGA believes, the Chat group was covertly leaked by a “backdoor splinter group of the CIA,” they would have surely sent it to a reporter like Sy Hersh who would have published the entire Chat before the bombs began to fall…

On January 29, ICE pulled over Bernandino Randa Marinas on his way to work in Chicago. After handing his ID to an ICE agent, Bernandino was ordered to keep his hands on the steering wheel of his car and not to move. He was held this way for around 40 minutes before one of the ICE officers told him he was under arrest. When Bernando asked to see a warrant, the officer quickly flashed him his cell phone. But he was not shown a Notice to Appear, and at the time of his arrest, there were no pending proceedings against him. Bernandino has lived in the US for more than 20 years, has two children who are US citizens, and a third is due in May. He has no criminal history. 

Brad Sigmon was executed to exhibit the power of the state over its citizens. By choosing to be put to death by firing squad, Sigmon forced the State of South Carolina to put this power on full and grotesque display. There was no hiding behind the supposedly humane method of filling an IV with poison and injecting it into a vein through a needle and a tube. There was no illusion in this execution. Sigmon wasn’t put to sleep. He had his heart blown out of his chest in front of 14 witnesses.

Trump has been gifted more power than he has taken. But now that he has accumulated so much authority through the weakness and political negligence of his opponents, he is in a position to seize and consolidate an unprecedented amount of power by himself, leaving the country almost defenseless against his vindictive whims and authoritarian aspirations.

Last week our co-rulers made separate appearances at CPAC, a kind of Dionysian festival for the Cult of MAGA, where both of them were far from laconic about their plans to recreate the Republic in their own images. Taking Xenophon as my model, I’ve pulled some relevant quotations from our two Diarchs so that we’ll have a keener sense of exactly the kind of tyranny-by-two that is in store for us…

While contemplating the incipient collapse of our Republic from an inside job, I dipped back into the six-volume edition of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that Alexander Cockburn gave me as a Christmas present years ago. Gibbon’s prose style is ornate, featuring wide-ranging and winding sentences that often end abruptly, like a dagger plunging. It takes some pages–and there are entire mountain ranges of them–to get used to his baroque rhetorical rhythm. Still, once you do, the book really picks up steam and roars along through decade after decade of unrivaled imperial villainy, personal cupidity and political turpitude.

On Wednesday in the Oval Office, Trump was allegedly told by X Æ A-Xii, one of Elon Musk’s 12 (known) kids, to “Shut up” and “You’re not the president!” Perhaps as compensation for being dissed by a four-year-old (who also wiped streams of snot on the Resolute Desk), Trump proclaimed himself the head of the Kennedy Center, whose annual awards he’d boycotted during his prior term, and called Putin to let him know he could take as much of Ukraine as he could carry back to Moscow, as long as he left the rare earth minerals behind for Trump.

We’ve reached that terminal point of imperial decay when the highest ambition of most members of Congress is to be a sycophant (though few of them could spell or define the word without consulting ChatGTP.) It’s rather bracing to watch nearly the entire Congress stand mute as Trump and Musk usurp the key constitutional powers assigned to the House and the Senate and dismantle agencies and whole departments of government created and funded by acts of Congress. Or, as David Graeber wrote in The Utopia of Rules: “It’s not just that some people get to break the rules—it’s that loyalty to the organization is to some degree measured by one’s willingness to pretend this isn’t happening.”

Give Trump some credit. He has no interest in faking empathy, as Biden did so ineptly. In Trump’s playbook, empathy is a weakness, even amid tragedy. Instead, each disaster is an opportunity to go on the attack, to ascribe blame on his enemies, to aggrandize himself, and to find ways to profit from the carnage, financially and politically. 

There was a messianic fervor in Trump’s Second Inaugural speech that wasn’t evident eight years ago. As dark as the 2016 American Carnage diatribe was, there was still the sense that Trump was a salesman pitching a vision he didn’t quite believe in but thought he needed to sell in order to legitimize himself to his own ragged ranks of followers. Mainly, he seemed surprised to find himself where he was. The man who returned to power this week seemed sterner, surer of how to leverage his authority and who to use it against, more confident of his own invincibility. Was this hubristic exhibition infused by the bullet that grazed his ear, or his close encounters with incarceration, and the Supreme Court anointing him with an almost Divine-like cloak of immunity to do whatever he wants for whatever venal reason?

I’m a natural born cynic, of course, but I can’t help but think that this ceasefire, this lull in the killing, is meant to erase, if not the memory of, at least the responsibility for, the killing that has come before. As Jean Baudrillard wrote: “Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.”

There’s nothing so terrifying as a nightmare come to life. The Santa Ana winds have haunted the dreams of southern Angelinos for decades. Like the Chinooks of the Rockies and the Mistrals of the Rhone Valley, these winds play on the mind. They tell you they’re coming for you. They whisper the dangers they bring with them. Van Gogh believed the mistral inflamed his madness. Another kind of madness seems to be inflicting LA, the madness of boundless consumption.

So why do I reprise the moldering life of John Lilburne now, during the time of a genocide that his country and my own have armed, funded, and run interference for, when the words that describe the horrors we’ve witnessed are being criminalized, and it’s become dangerous to speak or write about what you see happening and how you feel about it and even more perilous to act, in even small ways, to try to stop it.

For nearly two days, the NYPD covered up the fact that one of their officers had fired a gun inside Hind Hall, while they were arresting students. Ultimately, the shooting was only revealed by the New York City DA’s office. If you call in the NYPD, you can pretty much guarantee there will be bang-bang…Is there any doubt now that the NYPD raid did more damage to the buildings at Columbia than the students? The people who invited these cops on their campus should never be guardians of students again.

2024 will be the warmest year on record, the year warming topped 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s the year the US set new oil and gas production records, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. It’s a year that saw the US re-elect a climate denier who vows to double US oil production over these record levels, assuming that’s even possible.  It’s a year that saw two of the most destructive hurricanes in US history roar back-to-back across the Gulf Coast. It’s the year the temperatures in the Atlantic basin shattered records, the Arctic Ocean went ice-free, and the Atlantic Current continued to collapse. It’s the year a tropical cyclone demolished the French colony of Mayotte, killing as many as 10,000 people. It’s the year the UN climate conference, held in the oil city of Baku, failed to reach an agreement on phasing out fossil fuels and committed to providing less than a third of the annual climate funding needed for developing nations to transition from fossil fuels. It’s the year when CO2 levels hit 425.01 PPM, nearly 3 PPM more than last year’s record high. It’s the year when wildfires in Canada burned all year long.

Lame duck senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema cast decisive votes against Biden’s NLRB nominee, Lauren McFarren, ensuring that the Democrats will not secure control of the national labor regulator through 2026 and handing Trump effective control of the board when his term begins. The petulant Sinema, who hadn’t cast a vote since 11/21/24, seemed to enjoy making a final twist of the knife.

+ This x-ray may explain why Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson in the back… + Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “Violence is never the answer…but you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands…What happens when you turn this into the billionaires run it all is they get [...]

It appears that the killer of Brian Thompson left his manifesto etched on the spent casings of the bullets used to gun down the CEO of UnitedHealthcare outside the Midtown Hilton just down the block from Rockefeller Center: “Delay” and “Deny.” Those two chill words might also serve as the unofficial motto of the $500 billion health industry giant, whose investors Thompson was preparing to address.

Twenty-five years ago this week, the streets of Seattle erupted into the kind of militant protest rarely seen in the US. Over the course of five days, thousands of street activists counterpunched the global managers of neoliberalism in the face at their own confab, humiliated Bill Clinton and took the ruling class entirely off guard. The battle in Seattle became a kind of operational template for the popular protests of the both the right and left that followed in its wake: Code Pink’s anti-Iraq war demos, the Occupy Movement, the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter and, even, MAGA. The populist right certainly absorbed more lessons from the Battle of Seattle than the liberal elites of the Democratic Party–to their peril and ultimate doom.

The hysteria over Trump’s election must be tempered by just how awful Biden has been after the entirely predictable, if sinister, decision of the American electorate to return Trump to power. The liberal abreaction to Trump has revealed how thoroughly blind many have been to the vileness of Biden and his obedient circle of advisors and enforcers. If there was a secret Biden waiting until after the election to emerge, it was only a more malicious and baleful version of the Biden we’ve witnessed for the last four years. 

It’s been a hallucinatory week, which I hope explains my momentary lapse of reason in believing that an unshackled and restored Trump just might follow through on his vow to drive the neocon contagion from the halls of executive power, if only out of revenge for plotting against him for the last eight years. After all, this was the man who evicted John Bolton. (The right side of my brain reminds me that this was also the man who hired John Bolton and the equally odious Elliot Abrams.)

In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump amplified his anti-war rhetoric. Why? According to the New York Times, internal polling showed that still undecided voters were “six times as likely as other battleground-state voters to be motivated by their views of Israel’s war in Gaza.” Either the Harris campaign missed this lurking demographic or, more likely, just didn’t care. Of course, Trump’s still going to give Netanyahu the greenlight to burn Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon to the ground and then target Iran.

Kamala Harris proved too cowardly to even address her supporters Tuesday night, as her loss to Trump became more and more inevitable. But what could she really say? She couldn’t honestly say she’d run a hard campaign that championed the poor, the downtrodden, the voiceless, or that she’d fought for peace, human dignity and to fix an unraveling climate. I’d be really interested to hear her say what she thought her campaign was all about, but even Harris probably couldn’t have pinpointed the purpose or the meaning of her doomed run…

Cockburn used to say, vote for whoever makes you happy, knowing that the vote-counting machines will probably record it for someone you despise. So I filled out my ballot, though not very joyfully, and drove to the drop-off site in our little mill town, where the ballot box was being “monitored” by four MAGA people, adorned in their red hats, who, undeterred by the drenching rain, recorded my arrival on their cellphones and asked to see my ID, a request I replied to with a customary Italian gesture, as I told them had left my papers in Juarez.

More than half of Trump’s supporters don’t believe he’ll actually do many of the things he claims he’ll do (mass deportations, siccing the military on domestic protesters and political rivals), while more than half of Harris’s supporters hope she’ll implement many of the policies (end the genocide/single-payer) she claims she won’t. And that pretty much sums up this election.

A retaliatory military operation that many wizened pundits predicted would last no more than a month or so has now thundered on in ever-escalating episodes of violence and mass destruction for a year with no sign of relenting. What began as a war of vengeance has become a war of annihilation, not just of Hamas, but of Palestinian life and culture in Gaza and beyond.

There are already hundreds of allegations of price-gouging after Hurricane Helene and Milton. Harris was against price-gouging for about two days, then backed down after getting slapped by blowhards like Larry Summers–the Dick Cheney of economics. Nothing since, even though the evidence is everywhere. McDonalds is now suing the meatpacking industry for price-fixing…

This week’s vice-presidential debate, one of the most tedious and dull in US history, was praised by the punditocracy for its civility. Is civility in politics what we want when the current government is arming a genocide and the rival campaign wants to arrest 15 million people and deport them?

The State of Missouri executed Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams on Tuesday night despite knowing he was most likely innocent of the crime he was condemned for.

Miss Sassy started the biggest political fire since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lamp and burned down Chicago. Last month, Miss Sassy disappeared from the sight of her owner, Anna Kilgore, a Trump-Vance fanatic in Springfield, Ohio. After a couple of days, Kilgore called 9-11, claiming that her Calico cat may have been stolen and devoured by her Haitian neighbors, who she’d never bothered to get to know.

So Harris pretty effectively rebutted GOP accusations that she’s a communist, Marxist, socialist, pacifist, progressive, environmentalist, civil libertarian or humanist.