The President Speaks & an Omnibus of Engaged Art and Politics, News & Analysis
The Most Moral Police State in the World
The President of the United States of America strode proudly to the microphone. He gripped the lectern with both hands. He angled his big butt out to the side. With an asinine form of punk superiority, he scanned the red, white, and blue audience. Then he spoke.
We are the most moral people in the world. My administration is the most moral administration in United States history. We are beautiful people, glorious people.
That’s why we need ICE to go out into the streets all across our great and beautiful land and commit law and order in the name of freedom. This country is holy. It must be left alone to be all that it can be. That’s why the most holy members of our society put on masks and riot vests and carry guns and tasers and go beat the shit out of people who have it coming. The people have it coming!
You’ve seen all the glory of our day, the way the ICE agents knock down the criminals and the resisters and the terrorists who do us so much harm — in Minneapolis, in Portland, in Los Angeles. In all these blue cities. You notice all these cities are blue where the troublemakers live? All the blue cities in all the blue states. Leftists! They’re not American, that’s not America, not how it was meant to be, white as far as the eye can see. I don’t bring race into this on my own, skin color, eye color — that’s what the other side does, the blue side. I only say it because they say it. They’re always talking about the browns and the blacks. How they suffer. Whites suffer too! Somebody needs to talk about the whites, and stick up for the whites, stand up, finally at long last. We need more white Presidents! It’s a manly job! People say, Donbo King Tyrump, we don’t need more white male presidents, we need black and brown and female presidents, and to that I say, “Bullshit!” And I know you do to. We need to Make American White Male Again — MAWMA. MAWMA! Mommy! Remember when Mommy told us little young white boys that we were best? Well, we are! All the Presidents prove it! Almost all.
But now you’ve got all these horrible brown people come into the country doing all this grunt work, and crime too — never forget! Even the Native Americans — they refuse to leave from where they are not wanted. They are brown too, don’t let ‘em confuse you, tricky bastards. Natives are not Red like all the history books say — they’re brown as dirt, brown as any common border-hopping Mexican.
So, anyway, you got to bust all that up and scare the living shit out of people — brown, red, or purple — I’m as colorblind as the next person. You go into the schools and snatch their kids and hold ‘em hostage so that you can get at the parents. And you go to these old apartment complexes and rundown neighborhoods where they all like to live together and you bang on doors, morning, noon, and night, and you drag people out who have no business being here and going to work every morning as if they are entitled to live wherever they want! Like criminals that they are, you lock them up in the vans, and cells, and cages, one on top of the other and then you ship them out of the country for the good of all.
We’re building up ICE to be the largest police force in the world which it almost is already so that we can flood every city in the country simultaneously and control the elections finally. And the courts. And that way we can Make America Great Again with peace and stability and cleanliness for all, pure and simple — peace — what do they call it? — Pax Americana — peace at the point of a gun.
By God, I will make America in my own image. And it will be beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. A beautiful police state with cops on every corner and old white people protected at last, and families, beautiful white families safe and free to be proud and white again, here in America, land of the free.
Odds & Ends
An Omnibus of Engaged Art and Politics, News & Analysis
Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation”:
If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams — which is to say yes, the work must be political. It must have that as its thrust. That’s a pejorative term in critical circles now: if a work of art has any political influence in it, somehow it’s tainted. My feeling is just the opposite: if it has none, it is tainted. It seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
You certainly won’t find engaged literature — any literature? — in Jacobin magazine, or in most any left news periodical today — wholly unlike in times past when left-leaning progressive journals helped form and expand and strengthen the consciousness of the times by first serializing (or excerpting pre-book-publication) bestselling progressive cultural blockbusters, progressive literary classics, and other novels like The Jungle, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, News From Nowhere, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Dred, Daughter of Earth, Jews Without Money, Hard Times, Germinal, Mother, Herland…
Does anyone think that might be a problem?
Meanwhile, the internet is replacing religion, national, local, and family culture in people’s minds, except where it’s not.
In white supremacist imperial America that’s why it’s so important that white supremacist imperialists attempt to dominate the electronic mind, as well as physical society. That’s why they are going all out to do so, and staging shock troop ICE terrorism across the country to reinforce their supremacist tyrannical ideal.
That’s why it’s so important that left culture revolutionizes consciousness online too, and off.
If you’re steeped in left intellectual tradition, you can see the whole world, as an intellectual, and the possibilities for it. If you’re not, you can’t see the whole world. You can’t see the world as it is, let alone the possibilities for change.
There are other ways of knowing — traditional and historical, cultural — that can be very effective. But if you consider yourself to be an intellectual and if you can’t see through the eyes of the left, then you can only see poorly at best.
A left-wing view sees all from the point of view of the oppressed. A right-wing view sees only what it wants to see from the point of view of a wide variety of tyrannies.
The atomization and sterility of many cultural and social institutions and their professionals — the vitiating specialization — must play a role in gutting literature from left journals and newsletters. Also general defensiveness and protectiveness for left projects which are typically under assault from myriad directions. And often badly strapped for resources and so on. It’s a battered and besieged situation in a lot of ways. Professionalization filters in the sterile and filters out badly needed life, experience, and knowledge, seems like.
Look at the eleven populist novels, listed above, serialized in progressive journals — only two were published post World War One — Daughter of Earth and the proletarian populist standout novel Jews Without Money — and these two were merely excerpted not serialized, unlike the others.
So serialized left fiction took a huge hit post World War One. And subsequently the great left-wing magazines of the socialist era in America died out. Correlation? Causation? Hard to say but a great general loss in literature and culture, society and politics, absolutely. Serialized left lit should be revived today, especially given the gutted contemporary publishing establishment.
Going all the way back to Marx and Hegel, the left has often been profoundly ignorant (not unlike the right) on matters of literature and ideology and aesthetics. The Old Left of the 1910s and 1920s had a better conception than Marx and Hegel, but it could have been far better still, and then the New Left of the Frankfurt school and so on severely mishandled things and was co-opted by much Cold War ideology.
Better still, the left should produce its own progressive populist TV series and movies like, say, Most Revolutionary become Ultra Revolutionary.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should go Ultra Revolutionary. The Hill reports that “Ocasio-Cortez ramps up fight with Vance amid 2028 speculation”:
“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” she told a gaggle of reporters earlier this month.
“And that is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
Things are worse today than in the past in crucial ways. The corporate state could use nukes to end the world tomorrow. And human-instigated climate collapse termination is far more likely today than in the past, when it wasn’t possible at all.
Things are also much better in ways than they were even fifty years ago such that there is a real chance for a significant chunk of power, possibly a tipping point chunk of power, to be wrested from the capitalist rulers. It may not be likely, but it is noticeably possible now. And the plutocracy and the bigotocracy are so threatened by it that they are instituting a potentially full-blown form of Nazism in America, and may well take over as explicit dictatorship and cancel elections and all human rights law going forward — which has never happened in America before, but now at this point would not be unlikely.
Talk about cancel culture.
How about cancel all Earth? Let alone all Earth culture.
Shit’s on a real knife edge. Yes, it always has been in many ways, but now the threats are increasingly otherworldly.
Things have always been apocalyptic and tyrannical in many ways — especially for certain peoples and classes of people. Genocide has always been with us, including today. But with the advent of nukes and the Anthropocene and increasingly advanced technology, human-instigated omnicide is real for the first time. Though this can obscure the perhaps more revealing point today that a cascade of socialist revolutions may be possible now like never before.
And consequently the lethal finance state, police state actions against the progressive populist push grow increasingly seismic, and may well result in the end of elections, the end of the courts, and full-blown nuclear war and wholesale dictatorship in America, and across the world, in wildly unprecedented ways. Things can always get worse than ever before. Especially now that things are also threatening to get so very much better.
It is galling that many people are just waking up now to how bad things have always been, as if seeing it for the first time with the American funded, armed, and authorized genocide in Palestine, or explosion of ICE as a giant police state shock troop organization to terrorize the country. Galling that so many people have not seen that America has always been a genocidal, bigoted imperial-become-police state country. Better late than never, hopefully.
On the Conquest of Oila, I mean, Venezuela, Chris Isidore and Adam Cancryn of CNN report:
The Qatari banks holding the [Venezuelan oil] funds have been instructed to auction the money to Venezuelan banks… That money will be collected by the Central Bank of Venezuela and allocated according to the requirements set by the United States…
The fact the funds are being held in Qatar … allows for less US transparency of the movement of cash.
…this is being set up kind of like a slush fund,” said the expert who asked for anonymity. “It’s very troubling.” …
“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, in a comment to Semafor, which first reported the money going to Qatar. “That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”
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Jan 3
Well, well, here we are back at it so soon, planning the order of Empire. It’s one disciplinary b…
The People’s Navy — incredibly brave:
The Flotillas to Gaza Are the World’s Conscience
22 days ago · 424 likes · 28 comments · Chris Hedges
Meanwhile:
Aaron Rupar
LEAVITT: Why was Renee Good unfortunately and tragically killed?
REPORTER: Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably
LEAVITT: Oh, ok. So you’re a biased reporter with a biased opinion. You’re a left-wing hack.
Abolish the Police State — list of coups slightly updated:
CriticismCOUPS of sovereign leaders by America
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Jan 6
Imperial America — Coup Nation
American-Israeli treatment of Palestinians is not even as considerate as Swiftian cannibalism in “A Modest Proposal”:
Infant’s flesh will be in season throughout the year… I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat…
Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay the carcass; the skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.
…butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.
On the other hand, compassionate cannibalism never goes out of style, as in “A Practical Policy”:
So let me judiciously advance “A Practical Policy,” which I expect will not be liable to the least objection, for easing the troubled situation of children in Palestine and Lebanon and beyond.
It is my well-reasoned suggestion that there be implemented a carefully regulated expansion of commercial trafficking in children, worldwide — that is, the legalization of compassionate cannibalism of children — closely monitored to ensure the dignity of all.
The time has long since come to officially support and expand the body parts trade, with its great potential of many corporate byproducts and fiscal derivatives heretofore unimagined. I have recently been advised by virtually every corporate and financial executive I’ve encountered throughout the American Empire that children of impoverished nations principally, though not solely, are to be understood in explicit terms as the next great global growth industry — children as a prolific cash crop.
Palestinian children and countless other youths of the world, having little to no use or prospect, would be harvested for their own sake, and be mercifully removed from hopeless predicaments of hunger, disease, danger, and massacre. In many cases, the children might be sold abroad, their cut-rate labor placed in service of others in more profitable situations. Or the children might simply be released from their degraded, agonized state of being — that is, they would be terminated, offered as edibles for those fortunate enough to live in more bountiful circumstances.
Such enlightened policy is certain to receive the hearty endorsement of President Trump and all other high officials who are long since accustomed to fattening and shining their wallets and bellies on flayed skin and flesh, blood and tears.
Art can well do both — convey a kind of eternal truth and “make something happen,” concrete, to good effects. Plenty of examples throughout time.
The establishment ideological denial of this is politicized propaganda of the highest order, easily proven false. That’s why tyrants and bigots ban and burn books. It’s widely known to many what art does and can do very well. Such is the immense power of propaganda in literature — from the most refined to the most crude.
I find the constant intoning that Marxism has only much to say about the work of interpretation and not artistic production proper a bit baffling…
It’s not merely “baffling” — it’s quite stupid. Often intentionally stupid, playing dumb, or willing to be dumb, in an groveling attempt to meet the demands of establishment lit, editing, and publishing.
Often the “constant intoning” is straight-up deceit. Whatever the many motivations, it’s certainly a baseless view and understanding of art — demonstrated time and time again throughout history.
When the plutocracy wants money to give to its rich pals, it simply credits itself the money. When the People need money to meet their essential needs, the plutocracy says, “Fuck you!”:
The Federal Reserve has quietly delivered nearly half a trillion dollars to Wall Street with few strings attached over the past few months through an obscure government financial program intended for banks struggling to make cash payments.
The right-wing sees the Evil in itself and projects it onto everyone else. The liberators are terrorists, the terrorists are liberators. Classic psychology. Defense mechanism. Orwellian. Lies of Empire.
George Orwell learned all of the newspeak and doublespeak techniques included in his famed novel 1984 in the West, by the West, from the West, by working for the BBC, before he quit to write for a left-wing periodical.
Orwell’s 1984 is a novel derived largely from Orwell’s first-hand observations of the — yes, Orwellian — manipulations and workings of the British Broadcasting Corporation where he was employed during World War II. Though Orwell’s novel 1984 was seen as a critique of the official enemy of western capitalism, the Soviet Union (even as the Soviets ran their own kind of state-capitalism), all of the Orwellian newspeak that Orwell coined, documented, and dramatized in 1984 was based on the standard propaganda techniques of the BBC and all state-capitalist media during World War Two — continuing through today — techniques and practices that Orwell necessarily participated in and saw directly as a BBC employee during that time and that led to his resignation in the middle of the war to write for a left-wing magazine.
ICE is the KKK, essentially — the Ku Klux Klan legalized, armed, and massively funded by the state — the police state — with white masks instead of white hoods. The KKK — a ritualistic white terror state — was founded in 1865 in Tennessee by six former Confederate Army officers at the end of the US Civil War, thus far preceding Nazism — all-American. Looks like the South won the War, after all — The War Between the States, The War of Northern Aggression, The War for Southern Independence, The War to Preserve Slavery.
State-armed thugs profiling and rounding up people and shipping them into prison and concentration camps is also Nazism, which long-since too makes for a kind of straight-up Americana. Proud white supremacists led by proud white supremacists. Supremacists deputized with a badge, a gun, a mask, an anonymous van, prison cages, and concentration camps. Much of this is the traditional imperial American way. ICE is exactly what it looks like — state terrorism, masked, corporate, plutocrat funded.
The devils have come home to roost and roust, to crow, to thug, in thug nation. A thug nation led by suit-and-tied terrorists. Official state terrorists. It is what it is in the land of the Native exterminating, African enslaving, Mexican and world invading empire, from sea to shining sea, Manifest Destiny. O say can you see the end of all liberty? The worse people in the world run the show. And always have, even if by now it grows more evident to more people than ever before.
Fascism is just capitalism with an Italian accent.
Capitalism is simply rule by the rich — plutocracy.
Plutocracy is simply dictatorship by money — tyranny.
Of course all this is badly bigoted too.
And it is all anti-democracy and anti human rights.
In his decades-long suppressed introduction to Animal Farm, George Orwell noted of news and news media the same phenomena of social and political taboo that applies to literary and other publishing and cultural production — the lies of empire:
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news – things which on their own merits would get the big headlines – being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trouser in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
Case in point, the US Post Office refused to mail copies of the left-wing magazine The Masses because of its opposition to US involvement in the imperial bloodbath of World War One. See “A Brief History of The Masses” by Madeleine Baran in The Brooklyn Rail.
Courageous and brilliant anarchist Emma Goldman’s left-wing magazine Mother Earth was yet another vital left-wing journal of the socialist era in America, running from 1906 to 1917. Mother Earth was also forced out of existence by the Post Office and the Justice (Injustice) Department during World War One.
After being blocked and sued out of existence, The Masses was re-started under the name The Liberator (1918-1924) and was succeeded by New Masses (1926-1948).
Meanwhile, Appeal to Reason (1895-1922) had the greatest circulation of the four key left-wing magazines, more than a half million at its peak. Most of the artwork on the cover of the Liberation Lit anthology was first published in The Masses (1911-1917).
CriticismLeft-Wing Magazines — 1895-1948
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December 27, 2025
In America from the latter part of the 1800s to the middle of the 1900s the four most prominent left-win…
Three of the greatest novels written in the 1920s, maybe the three greatest — Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Jews Without Money — were written by the editors of the leading left-wing magazines of the day, The Liberator and The New Masses, both based in New York City, whose editors included Claude McKay and Mike Gold (Irwin Granich).
The world’s best-selling novel of the 19th century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher-Stowe, was first serialized in the progressive abolition newsletter The National Era.
The best-selling novel The Jungle was first serialized in Appeal to Reason, the progressive populist newspaper from Kansas. The newspaper funded Upton Sinclair the research for the novel, about $20,000 in today’s money.
This is the Great American Novel, sad to say — Brandon Taylor in “american symbolism: an insane year (already)”:
That’s the thing I can’t get over about the ICE footage. The abject human cruelty of it. Handcuffing these people. Dragging them over ice and sleet and concrete. Bloodying their bellies and their backs. Punching them in the face. Hitting them with the butts of rifles or choking them until they gasp and wheeze and their eyes turn red. Wrenching them from cars and throwing them to the ground, as if to stun them the way we used to stun roosters we knocked from the trees. I keep thinking, that is going to scrape that man’s back. He is going to be bleeding for hours. That is going to break that woman’s ribs. And they are going to leave her in a cell or in the back of a freezing van for hours. I keep thinking about the smell of those vans and those cars. The sweat and the blood. The ticking of the turn signals and the wheeze of the bruised people locked in the back. I keep thinking about the ICE agents stopping at Dunkin or Starbucks or buying Kratom at the gas station before parking outside of a school to drag mothers to their knees. I keep thinking about the faces, the way the people gasp when grabbed, their mouths opening in shock, their eyes going wide. How every video begins already in the thrust of the assault, as the dark agents swoop in on these people the way I’ve seen a large dog dart in upon a group of chickens at the corner of the fence. How quickly the blood comes. It’s astonishing to me, the scale of the cruelty and the immediacy of the cruelty. The pointlessness of the cruelty. The cruelty feels abstract to me, absurd. But the impact of the cruelty feels very, very real.
And we wake up every day to this. Have been waking up every day to this. People getting snatched. And the President and his regime posting about it. Posting through it. Making memes. Turning the abject human suffering into laughs. Because these are not people to them, but rather problems to be solved. Their most hated enemies.
The establishment blocks most left partisan art and other cultural works from existing or being known in the first place. And so it is that the culture is wildly confused and gutted and has a near impossible time of understanding itself and being able to act in sane and needed ways.
The need for left art and culture:
Mtume Gant:
“You have to create a systemic apparatus that is aligned with the revolutionary potential, and try to unlock the revolutionary potential of people, through ideology, growth, and utilizing audience as an interlocutor.”
Gabriel Rockhill:
[The establishment] “cultural apparatus … purges leftist politics, meaningful leftist politics, from the work that it decides to canonize. And it does this systematically. You see it in the theory world, you see it in art and culture, you see it in cinema. They try to purify the reified and isolated aesthetic product from the social totality out of which it emerged, which is political. And in doing that they really destroy the work, because they destroy the very fabric of its meaning.
Art should be able to give us an adequate picture of reality [notes Brecht]. And this is not some reductivist and banal idea. It is that art should give us the tools by which we understand the complexity of the material reality within which we are situated, and provide us with the skills necessary, or at least the approximation of a skill set, to transform that world. Otherwise what it’s doing is obscuring the real nature of relations. And that is a very powerful understanding of what culture does or is capable of doing.
Bourgeois culture though tends to want to present itself as apolitical, as if it were isolated from the realm of politics. And there’s lots of reasons why it does this, but one of them is precisely to provide cover for its political agenda. Because it says oh this isn’t a political issue. Everybody knows, for instance, that Cuba is a communist hellscape. It’s not politics, it’s just reality. And so the making of the liberal ideology about aesthetic products being apolitical is often just then invisibilizing their deep-seated political orientation. Against that one of the things we need to do … [is] resuscitate these forms of analysis and cultural production but also then reveal the extent to which the liberal apolitical approach is actually political through and through.
Today we need movies, shows, novels, and stories that not only lead to changed laws but to revolutionary movement.
We need the will to conceive, create, and distribute, per Mark Ruffalo, as reported by Variety:
Ruffalo is a proponent of films that tell true stories in a way that cement what could be passing news stories into the cultural consciousness, and/or have immediate real-life repercussions. “The story of ‘Spotlight,’ for example, was by itself a blockbuster story, but with the film ‘Spotlight,’ we changed laws. That movie helped people. It changed the world. With ‘Dark Waters,’ only a small percentage of people were reading the story of Rob Bilott, or watching the documentaries. When you make it a film, all of a sudden everyone is seeing it as a piece of entertainment and they’re learning as well. And more laws have been changed both nationally and internationally with those two things happening than if Rob had just done the thing by himself. We use these things to organize movements around. And that’s why it’s so important and that’s why this relationship between journalism and filmmaking is so important.”
What kind of movies might come out about what is happening in the present-day? That was a recurring theme through Friday evening, on- and off-stage. Director Ethan Silverman, in a quote moment before the show, whispered: “This is a really important time to be doing this… The clarion call of Woodward and Bernstein was so huge, so immense. What’s scary to me at this moment is that Nixon and Watergate seem so quaint.”
In a conversation earlier in the day before rehearsals began, Ruffalo got deeper into his motivation for doing the show right now.
“We had 127 journalists killed in Gaza; there’s journalists being killed all over the world. Journalism in the United States is being killed metaphorically, through buyouts. And we see what happened with (Jimmy) Kimmel and the kind of censorship that’s [floating around. So in Hollywood today, because this film had such an impact, and with the things we’re facing with the monopolization of newspapers and newsrooms all over the nation…”
Literature and its individual works are quantifiable and objectively understandable in all kinds of way, not in every way, but in many very revealing and useful ways.
Way ahead of the repugs. Oila should be the 51st state: fictiongutted.substack.…
Courtney Waller
A Florida Congressman introduced a bill to make Greenland the 51st state.
Yeah. That isn’t how it works. And he knows that. Instead of being outraged by the fact this got pen put to paper and introduced…let’s maybe flood his inbox asking why he isn’t doing any real work and instead has time for shenanigans.
Ro Khanna
I am calling for the arrest and prosecution of the ICE agent that shot and killed Renee Good.
I am also calling on Congress to support my bill with Rep. Crockett to force ICE agents to wear body cameras, not wear masks, have visible identification, and ensure ICE has independent oversight.
Proud Nazi Kristi Noem — US Secretary of Homeland Security — the American police state official in charge of institutionalizing insecurity in the country — spoke from a lectern that said “One of ours — all of yours” after the killing of Renee Good by ICE. A clear threat of state massacre.“One of ours, all of yours.” This is a fascist slogan dating back to Hitler and Franco. It means that if anti-fascists kill a single fascist gendarme, then fascists force will respond by murdering a large number of people in the community from which the anti-fascist killer is thought to have come. There are many examples of Hitler’s Third Reich engaging in such retaliatory, mass-murderous collective punishment. Following the assassination of Gestapo official Reinhard Heydrich outside Prague on May 29, 1942, the German occupiers of Czechoslovakia quickly executed 1,331 Czechs, including 201 women. As William Shirer noted in his classic volume The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, German Security … See more
In order to preserve and expand the status quo, the establishment — wealth to the wealthy — Trump and Trumpism is all performance theater — a “tyranny of one” — everyone can be their own superman and wonderwoman, a cult of themselves. Join the Trumpist cult, like the Army of old, and instead of being an “Army of One” be a “Tyranny of One” — a tyrant above all. Your own self as cult — your super-self, your Trumpist self. Your Trump self.
This is the way to destroy collective consciousness — all for one and one for all. You change it to the Trumpist view: One against all, because all against one. Supposedly.
Or, as Walter Benjamin describes this omnicidal state of consciousness in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936):
The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation.
[People’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
Nick Perri
Philly is not fucking around. This should be happening in EVERY. FUCKING. CITY!
2
Here now in “ICE winter,” with federal police rampaging and murdering across the nation, it’s time to remember Claude McKay’s famed poem “If We Must Die” published during “Red Summer” in The Liberator, July 1919.
Criticism“sharp as steel with discontent”
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Jan 10
Great poet, novelist, and socialist — a serious political and literary writer for the masses — Claude McKay often filled the pages of The…
Is this not what is meant by timeless fiction? Epic works of anti-empire? Nobleman and crown loyalist “William Shakespeare” wrote famed pro-monarchy plays during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Should people of conscience today, leftists, pro-democracy, not write anti-empire, anti-capitalist, anti-bigoted-tyranny today?
President Donbo King Tyrump was pissed. He ordered that the entire northern border of Mexico be “carpet bombed into oblivion!” The President considered, not for the first time, bombing all of Central and South America, giving them the North Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc, etc, etc treatment so that there be no refuge for anyone anywhere.
What Wall Street’s economic hit men had not yet destroyed, Washington DC’s bombs and bullets would finish off. There would be crisis and then there would be capitalism to reap the whirlwind. Millions would suffer, millions would die, a relative few would profit. The way of the world.
The President of the USA punched the air.
I am who I am! President Tyrump called to reporters upon touching down in his helicopter near a slaughterfield. I make my America great again! This is everything we ever wanted! We own the world! We own all! God bless the USA! Where else can a person rise from mere billions to go out and conquer the planet?!
Thus did fall once again the exploding hammer of American Exceptionalism on Mexico and on the Americas, Central and South, as it continued to fall on the world abroad – Asia, Africa, even Europe – and at home: Texas, Appalachia, the Deep South, the Native Southwest, the corroded cities and blighted suburbs and poisoned countryside.
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June 13, 2025
In Empire All In — my 2016 anti-Trump novel — when the literary establishment was AWOL, as it remains, I depicted the villainous Trump figure invading Texas, with plans to invade many other states, a…
Defund the Police is essentially a vague proposed plank, or a slogan really, roughly aligned with the many planks that came out of the Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders movements. I always thought that the better slogan would be Replace the Police — with various civil/social service groups.
People, their imaginations, need something to hang onto to move toward, to make sense of change. So, Replace the Police [State]. And a whole lot more.
“Defunding” the police should be obvious and implied in such a slogan.
Zohran Mamdani, to become Mayor of NYC, focused on the “affordability” crisis. There is also a much larger brutality crisis, of which the affordability crisis is part.
Defund the Police State is probably a better slogan, and necessary, as with Defund the Military State and the Prison State and the One Percent. Abolition of the Police, Military, and Prison State, and the One Percent, would revolutionize the society, and necessarily gut the tyrannical mechanism of capitalism.
These are slogans and ideals that can be more exactingly expressed and turned into actual policy plans, tactics, and proposals, which are actually already in somewhat limited circulation.
Institutionalizing, and of course articulating, related measures remains the ongoing challenge.
American empire uses guns and dollars interchangeably to maintain its stranglehold on exploitation and profiteering and immiseration.
Important to realize that society has been split in two, or three, by the plutocracy. Fundamentally. It’s not a natural split. It’s a manufactured artificial one.
The main destructive forces in this society are plutocracy and bigotry. Each weaponizing the other against democracy and human rights, which themselves fight back against the bigoted plutocratic assault and division of society.
All the endless arguments over vital forms in art are, at best, proxy battles for arguments over compelling and imperative content, though establishment obfuscation and ideology holds otherwise. If your form feels flat, thin, weak, or nowhere, take a long hard look at your content to discover the basis of the problem — as long as you have an essential handle on aesthetic tools, no small thing in art. So it is with consciousness and life, with society and politics, with conversation and labor, with story and love, with the fate of the world. What the Hell is your content? What really wakes you up and might move the world? Form follows.
Best not to sleep on it.
CriticismThe Basis for Revolution in Culture, Consciousness, and Story
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August 10, 2025
What is American literature, or even world literature, today in an age of omnicide? What need it be?
Who gets to say what in any country is always a loaded political act — whether it be in art, journalism, scholarship, or daily conversation, let alone in any school, workplace, religious institution, prison, or any other public or private place.
And so it is that Literary Times are always subject to change, and, in fact, are always changing.
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August 19, 2025
Do we live in metamodern literary times — a cross between the modern and postmodern? This is the subject of a recent article “How Metamodernism Can Save Us All” by Thaddeus Thomas at the Republic of …
The socialist, human rights revolution by Sabia Perez and allies still going strong in Ultra Revolutionary:
Just so, Sabia levered Alecta to meet the people’s demands, and they achieved a good bit: guaranteed monthly income, higher wages, expanded poverty relief, universal health care, free childcare, paid family leave, the abolition of ICE, and full legalization and inclusion of undocumented people for the survival, dignity, and relief of all. Plus demands for structural power that erased medical and educational debt, making college free, sharply reducing incarceration, and redirecting police and military funding into housing and social services. An end to America’s killer economic sanctions and military invasions that crush people around the world.
The ALA also demanded shorter workweeks, more vacation and voting access, and a restructured financial system funded by wealth taxes and a trillion dollars of national emergency credit to a public bank. After all, liberation means material security and dignity, reduced coercion and oppression, and a decisive shift of resources away from the police state to the social dignity state, away from punishment and war to human and ecological care and public well-being.
And so it is that Sabia’s Revolution has already gutted all student and medical debt, gotten paid holidays expanded, wages raised for federal contract workers, which lifts wages for others, far more access to food, housing, and education, health care, and marijuana decriminalization with nonviolent convictions cleared, post offices transformed into free public banks, a new national bank established and freely funded ex nihilo, out of thin air, like the big private banks do for their rich buddies but not for the people, in fact against the people, to pillage and profiteer. And Sabia and the demands and leverage of the ALA got many other kinds of material improvements, environmental repair, and a massive reduction of militarization at home and abroad. But much more needs to be done, because private business does so little for people who cannot pay the price, and often performs poorly for even those who can afford goods and services. Some serious nationalization of industry and society is in order or the world will continue to burn and the people will suffer and die as always. Sabia and the ALA still face too many monstrous creations of the world, like David against Goliath. Main Street and country roads have been improved for the better – patched and bandaged here and there – but remain far from fully transformed for the good of all.
And, oh yes, Sabia has read her Karl Marx and her Walter Benjamin. Jasmine Maldonado – Montessori teacher extraordinaire – insisted on it. You fight performance politics with material politics, brutal bigoted expression with socialist art and expression, action and accomplishments. During interwar Germany of the past century, the ill-fated left partisan Walter Benjamin saw in the depredations of capitalism and Nazism and fascism – those ghoulish blood brothers – he foresaw the genocidal cult of bigoted tyranny of Trumpism-to-come, firsthand, and he described this omnicidal state of consciousness in his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin showed that fascism turns politics into aesthetics, using ritual and the “Führer cult” – the cult of personality – to dominate the masses. Bigoted grand illusions become aestheticized politics used by the plutocracy, to preserve and further enrich itself by mobilizing the masses into war – civil war and national war and cultural war and entirely irrational war. People become alienated, and even take pleasure in their own destruction, let alone the destruction of others – Evil made aesthetic.
In contrast, the workers of liberatory revolution, they politicize art and material gains for the good of the people and against the aestheticized politics of supremacy, homicide, and pillaging rendered by lies and illusions into mesmerizing Evil and omnicide, like a lethal supremacist cult of the Joker.
Revolutionaries fight against the plutocrats who make people act evil and even against their own best interests, who make evil aesthetic. The plutocrats make evil godly. They make the lie the truth. They make the good the terroristic and demonized. They make evil glamorous and glorified. They are monsters garbed as heroes. They are viruses clothed as saviors. And if they can’t dupe you, they try to scare you. And if they can’t scare you, they assault you. Or they impoverish you, or lock you up, or kill you. And so Sabia fights back. As do many others.
Revolutionaries, like Sabia, fight the fascist glorification of war that further enriches the rich. But where are the Revolutionary artists of the age? Hard to find a good literary and revolutionary novel today that is explicit about the contemporary moment in America. And what of shows and movies? The commercial establishment is too bought-and-sold by capitalist profiteering. The literary establishment is too stupid and brainwashed, too gutless and cultivated, too culturally conditioned and ideological, supremacist, too institutionally captive to know or to care, to act or to create for revolution. Or even to much allow it in its midst. The unspeakable revolutionary reality remains taboo among the respectable. So be it. Fuck ‘em all.
Sabia, Jenna, and Jasmine fight the monstrous day like the socialist partisans who fought Hitler and Mussolini. They fight the Trumpocracy, and the plutocracy everywhere. They fight establishment apologists. They fight the tyranny of money and bigotry, whether Democrat or Republican, or any other sellout to big money and hate, bought-and-sold. The Police State must be defanged, defunded, and replaced with fully funded and strong social units – services of life, not death. And fuck these weak-ass motherfuckers who have the gall and brainlessness to say, no. Fuck you.
Most RevolutionaryLive Another Day
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Jan 13
Sabia Perez rises from the crypt.
A Practical Policy 