What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops federalized; and military weapons, tactics and equipment on full display—is intended to intimidate, distract and discourage us from pulling back the curtain on the reality of the self-serving corruption, grift, graft, overreach and abuse that have become synonymous with his Administration.

Don’t be distracted. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be sidelined by the spectacle of a police state.

This is yet another manufactured crisis fomented by the Deep State.

When Trump issues a call to “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” explaining to reporters that he wants to have them “everywhere,” we should all be alarmed.

This is martial law without a formal declaration of war.

This heavy-handed, chest-thumping, politicized, militarized response to what is clearly a matter for local government is yet another example of Trump’s disregard for the Constitution and the limits of his power.

Political protests are protected by the First Amendment until they cross the line from non-violent to violent. Even when protests turn violent, constitutional protocols remain in place to safeguard communities: law and order must flow through local and state chains of command, not from federal muscle.

By breaking that chain of command, Trump is breaking the Constitution.

Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by civilian police, despite the objections of local and state leaders, crosses the line into authoritarianism.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

In the span of a single week, the Trump administration is providing the clearest glimpse yet of its unapologetic, uncompromising, corrupt allegiance to the authoritarian Deep State.

These two events—the federalization of the National Guard deployed to California in response to protests and the president’s lavish, taxpayer-funded military parade in the nation’s capital—bookend the administration’s unmistakable message: dissent will be crushed, and power will be performed.

Trump governs by force (military deployment), fear (ICE raids, militarized policing), and spectacle (the parade).

This is the spectacle of a police state. One side of the coin is militarized suppression. The other is theatrical dominance. Together, they constitute the language of force and authoritarian control.

Yet this is more than political theater; it is a constitutional crisis in motion.

As we have warned before, this tactic is a familiar one.

In times of political unrest, authoritarian regimes often invoke national emergencies as a pretext to impose military solutions. The result? The Constitution is suspended, civilian control is overrun, and the machinery of the state turns against its own people.

This is precisely what the Founders feared when they warned against standing armies on American soil: that one day, the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them.

It is a textbook play from the authoritarian handbook, deployed with increasing frequency under Trump. The optics are meant to intimidate, broadcast control, and discourage resistance before it even begins.

Thus, deploying the National Guard in this manner is not just a political maneuver—it is a strategic act of fear-based governance designed to instill terror, particularly among vulnerable communities, and ensure compliance.

America is being transformed into a battlefield before our eyes.

Militarized police. Riot squads. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Stun grenades. Crowd control and intimidation tactics.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

This is the language of force.

This transformation is not accidental—it’s strategic. The government now sees the public not as constituents to be served but as potential combatants to be surveilled, managed, and subdued. In this new paradigm, dissent is treated as insurrection, and constitutional rights are treated as threats to national security.

What we are witnessing today is also part of a broader setup: an excuse to use civil unrest as a pretext for militarized overreach.

We saw signs of this strategy in Charlottesville, Virginia, where police failed to de-escalate and at times exacerbated tensions during protests that should have remained peaceful. The resulting chaos gave authorities cover to crack down—not to protect the public, but to reframe protest as provocation and dissent as disorder.

Then and now, the objective wasn’t to preserve peace and protect the public. It was to delegitimize dissent and cast protest as provocation.

It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the Deep State. The government wants a reason to crack down, lock down, and bring in its biggest guns.

This is how it begins.

Trump’s use of the military against civilians violates the spirit—if not the letter—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is meant to bar federal military involvement in domestic affairs. It also raises severe constitutional questions about the infringement of First Amendment rights to protest and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure.

Modern tools of repression compound the threat. AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing software, biometric databases, and fusion centers have made mass control seamless and silent. The state doesn’t just respond to dissent anymore; it predicts and preempts it.

While boots are on the ground in California, preparations are underway for a military spectacle in Washington, D.C.

At first glance, a military procession might seem like a patriotic display. But in this context, it is not a celebration of service; it is a declaration of supremacy. It is not about honoring troops; it is about reminding the populace who holds the power and who wields the guns.

This is how authoritarian regimes govern—through spectacle.

By sandwiching a military crackdown between a domestic troop deployment and a showy parade, Trump is sending a unified message: This is about raw, unchecked, theatrical power. And whether we, the people, will accept a government that rules not by consent, but by coercion.

The Constitution was not written to accommodate authoritarian pageantry. It was written to restrain it. It was never meant to sanctify conquest as a form of governance.

We are at a crossroads.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Strip away that consent, and all that remains is conquest through force, spectacle, and fear.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we allow the language of fear, the spectacle of dominance, and the machinery of militarized governance to become normalized, then we are no longer citizens of a republic—we are subjects of a police state.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Let us be very clear: the Trump Administration does not want citizenship to be a right. They want it to be a reward for the loyal, the rich, or the compliant.

To this end, President Trump’s bid to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is a modern-day Trojan horse masquerading as a concern for national security.

This is not about protecting America, but redefining America from the top down.

That redefinition is already underway.

The Trump Administration’s plans to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy investors as a path to citizenship and consideration of a pitch for a reality show that would “pit immigrants against each other for a chance at a fast-tracked path to citizenship” are not just absurd—they’re obscene.

They reveal a government willing to reduce constitutional rights to commodities, auctioned off to the highest bidder or trivialized for ratings.

This governing by performance turns a constitutional guarantee into a privilege for sale or spectacle. It’s part of a calculated effort to recast citizenship as conditional, transactional, and exclusionary. Whether by wealth, loyalty, or ideology, this emerging framework decides who is “deserving” of rights—and who is not.

It is fear-based nationalism that disguises a deeper threat: the normalization of government power to decide who is entitled to rights and who is not.

We see this in action with the Trump Administration’s stance on childbirth and citizenship.

It’s a contradiction: while the Trump Administration decries falling birthrates and offers financial incentives for childbirth, it demonizes birthright citizenship for the very communities that are actually having children and contributing significantly to the economy without any guarantee of anything in return.

Yet this brazenly hypocritical double standard is just a distraction, part of the political theater designed to pit Americans against each other while the power brokers rewrite the rules behind closed doors.

The real power play rests in the Trump Administration’s efforts to gut the Fourteenth Amendment, sidestep the courts, and redefine who qualifies as American—all by executive fiat.

Redefining citizenship by executive order is not governance. It is a bloodless coup—one that overthrows a constitutional republic founded on the rule of law—to reconfigure the face of the nation in the image of the unelected Deep State and its machinery of control.

Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that all persons born on U.S. soil would be recognized as full citizens—a direct rebuke to the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could not be citizens. Its language is unambiguous: all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens.

This principle was upheld by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which affirmed that children born in the U.S. to foreign nationals are entitled to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.

That precedent still stands.

Yet that legacy—of constitutional protections prevailing over prejudice—is now at risk.

Some have recently argued—including the Trump Administration in legal filings—that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended solely to grant citizenship to the children of former slaves after the Civil War, and thus no longer applies to children born to undocumented immigrants. But if that logic is taken seriously, it undermines the citizenship of everyone born in America.

After all, if the government—not the Constitution—gets to decide who qualifies as a citizen, then no one’s status is secure.

If your citizenship depends on government approval, your rights aren’t inalienable—they’re transitory privileges.

That’s not just bad law. It’s tyranny in the making.

Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat and executive order, presidents cannot pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they will honor.

Yet perhaps even more concerning than Trump’s war on birthright citizenship itself is the administration’s underlying legal strategy to test the limits of judicial authority—specifically, to restrict the power of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions against unconstitutional actions.

You see, this is not just an immigration battle, nor is it only a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment.

It is a calculated attempt to strip the judiciary of its ability to check executive abuse and a full-frontal assault on the judiciary’s role as a co-equal branch of government entrusted with interpreting the law and defending individual rights against majoritarian overreach.

If successful, it would mark a seismic shift in the balance of powers, subordinating the courts to the whims of the executive branch.

As James Madison wrote, the accumulation of all powers in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

The same unchecked power used to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants today could just as easily be turned against you to strip you of your citizenship, based on your political beliefs, religious views, or failure to toe the party line.

This is the danger the Founders warned against: a government that grants rights only to the loyal, the favored, or the compliant.

And make no mistake: what we’re witnessing is another point along the slippery slope of the effort to recast birthright citizenship—not as a right—but as a privilege, subject to political approval and ideological purity tests.

In this emerging framework, being born in America is no longer enough—you must also prove your worth, allegiance, and compliance.

Worse still, this would set a precedent that constitutional rights can be rewritten by executive whim, paving the way for even greater erosions of liberty.

If we do not hold the line here, this erosion of liberty will only accelerate.

Birthright citizenship is more than a legal technicality. It is a cornerstone of American democracy and equality. The attempt to destroy it through executive power is a direct threat to the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the future of liberty in America.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if the government can erase one constitutional right today, it can erase another tomorrow.

This is exactly why the Founders drafted a Constitution that limits power and protects individuals, not just the popular or the powerful.

Once we allow the government to decide who is “deserving” of rights, we’ve already surrendered the rule of law. What remains is not a constitutional republic, but an empire of arbitrary rule.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Let us be very clear: the Trump Administration does not want citizenship to be a right. They want it to be a reward for the loyal, the rich, or the compliant.

To this end, President Trump’s bid to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is a modern-day Trojan horse masquerading as a concern for national security.

This is not about protecting America, but redefining America from the top down.

That redefinition is already underway.

The Trump Administration’s plans to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy investors as a path to citizenship and consideration of a pitch for a reality show that would “pit immigrants against each other for a chance at a fast-tracked path to citizenship” are not just absurd—they’re obscene.

They reveal a government willing to reduce constitutional rights to commodities, auctioned off to the highest bidder or trivialized for ratings.

This governing by performance turns a constitutional guarantee into a privilege for sale or spectacle. It’s part of a calculated effort to recast citizenship as conditional, transactional, and exclusionary. Whether by wealth, loyalty, or ideology, this emerging framework decides who is “deserving” of rights—and who is not.

It is fear-based nationalism that disguises a deeper threat: the normalization of government power to decide who is entitled to rights and who is not.

We see this in action with the Trump Administration’s stance on childbirth and citizenship.

It’s a contradiction: while the Trump Administration decries falling birthrates and offers financial incentives for childbirth, it demonizes birthright citizenship for the very communities that are actually having children and contributing significantly to the economy without any guarantee of anything in return.

Yet this brazenly hypocritical double standard is just a distraction, part of the political theater designed to pit Americans against each other while the power brokers rewrite the rules behind closed doors.

The real power play rests in the Trump Administration’s efforts to gut the Fourteenth Amendment, sidestep the courts, and redefine who qualifies as American—all by executive fiat.

Redefining citizenship by executive order is not governance. It is a bloodless coup—one that overthrows a constitutional republic founded on the rule of law—to reconfigure the face of the nation in the image of the unelected Deep State and its machinery of control.

Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that all persons born on U.S. soil would be recognized as full citizens—a direct rebuke to the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could not be citizens. Its language is unambiguous: all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens.

This principle was upheld by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which affirmed that children born in the U.S. to foreign nationals are entitled to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.

That precedent still stands.

Yet that legacy—of constitutional protections prevailing over prejudice—is now at risk.

Some have recently argued—including the Trump Administration in legal filings—that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended solely to grant citizenship to the children of former slaves after the Civil War, and thus no longer applies to children born to undocumented immigrants. But if that logic is taken seriously, it undermines the citizenship of everyone born in America.

After all, if the government—not the Constitution—gets to decide who qualifies as a citizen, then no one’s status is secure.

If your citizenship depends on government approval, your rights aren’t inalienable—they’re transitory privileges.

That’s not just bad law. It’s tyranny in the making.

Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat and executive order, presidents cannot pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they will honor.

Yet perhaps even more concerning than Trump’s war on birthright citizenship itself is the administration’s underlying legal strategy to test the limits of judicial authority—specifically, to restrict the power of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions against unconstitutional actions.

You see, this is not just an immigration battle, nor is it only a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment.

It is a calculated attempt to strip the judiciary of its ability to check executive abuse and a full-frontal assault on the judiciary’s role as a co-equal branch of government entrusted with interpreting the law and defending individual rights against majoritarian overreach.

If successful, it would mark a seismic shift in the balance of powers, subordinating the courts to the whims of the executive branch.

As James Madison wrote, the accumulation of all powers in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

The same unchecked power used to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants today could just as easily be turned against you to strip you of your citizenship, based on your political beliefs, religious views, or failure to toe the party line.

This is the danger the Founders warned against: a government that grants rights only to the loyal, the favored, or the compliant.

And make no mistake: what we’re witnessing is another point along the slippery slope of the effort to recast birthright citizenship—not as a right—but as a privilege, subject to political approval and ideological purity tests.

In this emerging framework, being born in America is no longer enough—you must also prove your worth, allegiance, and compliance.

Worse still, this would set a precedent that constitutional rights can be rewritten by executive whim, paving the way for even greater erosions of liberty.

If we do not hold the line here, this erosion of liberty will only accelerate.

Birthright citizenship is more than a legal technicality. It is a cornerstone of American democracy and equality. The attempt to destroy it through executive power is a direct threat to the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the future of liberty in America.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if the government can erase one constitutional right today, it can erase another tomorrow.

This is exactly why the Founders drafted a Constitution that limits power and protects individuals, not just the popular or the powerful.

Once we allow the government to decide who is “deserving” of rights, we’ve already surrendered the rule of law. What remains is not a constitutional republic, but an empire of arbitrary rule.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Let us be very clear: the Trump Administration does not want citizenship to be a right. They want it to be a reward for the loyal, the rich, or the compliant.

To this end, President Trump’s bid to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is a modern-day Trojan horse masquerading as a concern for national security.

This is not about protecting America, but redefining America from the top down.

That redefinition is already underway.

The Trump Administration’s plans to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy investors as a path to citizenship and consideration of a pitch for a reality show that would “pit immigrants against each other for a chance at a fast-tracked path to citizenship” are not just absurd—they’re obscene.

They reveal a government willing to reduce constitutional rights to commodities, auctioned off to the highest bidder or trivialized for ratings.

This governing by performance turns a constitutional guarantee into a privilege for sale or spectacle. It’s part of a calculated effort to recast citizenship as conditional, transactional, and exclusionary. Whether by wealth, loyalty, or ideology, this emerging framework decides who is “deserving” of rights—and who is not.

It is fear-based nationalism that disguises a deeper threat: the normalization of government power to decide who is entitled to rights and who is not.

We see this in action with the Trump Administration’s stance on childbirth and citizenship.

It’s a contradiction: while the Trump Administration decries falling birthrates and offers financial incentives for childbirth, it demonizes birthright citizenship for the very communities that are actually having children and contributing significantly to the economy without any guarantee of anything in return.

Yet this brazenly hypocritical double standard is just a distraction, part of the political theater designed to pit Americans against each other while the power brokers rewrite the rules behind closed doors.

The real power play rests in the Trump Administration’s efforts to gut the Fourteenth Amendment, sidestep the courts, and redefine who qualifies as American—all by executive fiat.

Redefining citizenship by executive order is not governance. It is a bloodless coup—one that overthrows a constitutional republic founded on the rule of law—to reconfigure the face of the nation in the image of the unelected Deep State and its machinery of control.

Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that all persons born on U.S. soil would be recognized as full citizens—a direct rebuke to the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could not be citizens. Its language is unambiguous: all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens.

This principle was upheld by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which affirmed that children born in the U.S. to foreign nationals are entitled to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.

That precedent still stands.

Yet that legacy—of constitutional protections prevailing over prejudice—is now at risk.

Some have recently argued—including the Trump Administration in legal filings—that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended solely to grant citizenship to the children of former slaves after the Civil War, and thus no longer applies to children born to undocumented immigrants. But if that logic is taken seriously, it undermines the citizenship of everyone born in America.

After all, if the government—not the Constitution—gets to decide who qualifies as a citizen, then no one’s status is secure.

If your citizenship depends on government approval, your rights aren’t inalienable—they’re transitory privileges.

That’s not just bad law. It’s tyranny in the making.

Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat and executive order, presidents cannot pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they will honor.

Yet perhaps even more concerning than Trump’s war on birthright citizenship itself is the administration’s underlying legal strategy to test the limits of judicial authority—specifically, to restrict the power of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions against unconstitutional actions.

You see, this is not just an immigration battle, nor is it only a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment.

It is a calculated attempt to strip the judiciary of its ability to check executive abuse and a full-frontal assault on the judiciary’s role as a co-equal branch of government entrusted with interpreting the law and defending individual rights against majoritarian overreach.

If successful, it would mark a seismic shift in the balance of powers, subordinating the courts to the whims of the executive branch.

As James Madison wrote, the accumulation of all powers in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

The same unchecked power used to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants today could just as easily be turned against you to strip you of your citizenship, based on your political beliefs, religious views, or failure to toe the party line.

This is the danger the Founders warned against: a government that grants rights only to the loyal, the favored, or the compliant.

And make no mistake: what we’re witnessing is another point along the slippery slope of the effort to recast birthright citizenship—not as a right—but as a privilege, subject to political approval and ideological purity tests.

In this emerging framework, being born in America is no longer enough—you must also prove your worth, allegiance, and compliance.

Worse still, this would set a precedent that constitutional rights can be rewritten by executive whim, paving the way for even greater erosions of liberty.

If we do not hold the line here, this erosion of liberty will only accelerate.

Birthright citizenship is more than a legal technicality. It is a cornerstone of American democracy and equality. The attempt to destroy it through executive power is a direct threat to the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the future of liberty in America.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if the government can erase one constitutional right today, it can erase another tomorrow.

This is exactly why the Founders drafted a Constitution that limits power and protects individuals, not just the popular or the powerful.

Once we allow the government to decide who is “deserving” of rights, we’ve already surrendered the rule of law. What remains is not a constitutional republic, but an empire of arbitrary rule.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

As Trump-Musk take a hatchet to American higher education, I marvel at the thought that there are hundreds if not thousands of Curtins (maybe not as good) across the vast US, most at small liberal arts colleges, all in love with words and wisdom, all teaching their students lovingly, urging them to THINK. That is surely the beauty of America, the promise to take the world’s poor and reviled and give them the chance to be someone, do something worthwhile.

Curtin, from his earliest memories, saw that conventional life was a provocation because it hid more than it revealed; that it harbored secrets that could not be exposed or else the make-believe nature of normal life would collapse like a cardboard set. Like everyone, I was ushered onto this Shakespearean stage and have acted out many roles assigned to me, but always with the inner consciousness that something was amiss. Everyone seemed to be playing someone, but who was the player? Is the role playing us? Are we marionettes in some pipe dream, and is there an author behind it? God? The devil? Capitalism?

Curtin’s postmodern credo comes from Thoreau: We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. There are no neutral observers.

His goal: to oppose these scoundrels and their ilk who kill and wage endless wars against innocents around the world, in a way that will delight and last a little while.

Writing as music

Curtin admits he is obsessed with words. That they play him. He, in turn, uses them to produce both astute political analyses and art in luminescent words and sentences that pulsate. I think of them as intertwined lovers. AI is taking capitalism to its Faustian apotheosis, to mechanize us all, to eliminate passion and will. Reduce thought to dead words. Curtin compares his writing to composing, hoping to leave a fresh song in your heart, something to help you see the pageant of our lives in more than just dead words.

In The End of the Speed Limit on the Highway to Nowhere, he compares us to Sisyphus but without the illusion of ascent, merely going in a circle, returning to the same grey reality of the freedom-to-choose-what-is-always-the-same, seen as a mediated, rootless reality that is no reality at all. Yes, you can fly anywhere in the world (if you are part of SWIFT), but you will find the same McDonald’s and box stores, more or less the same sandy beaches, and souvenirs made in China. Fake diversity. Fake news, to quote our fake king-of-the-world.

We are flooded with unneeded techno ‘miracles’, but without roots we are swept away by them, our mediated reality providing no signposts for where we are headed, no warnings of pitfalls that threaten our real Reality and us, allowing us to pause, to take a stand. Root in Latin is radix, i.e., radical, which today means extreme, as if we unconsciously mold our thinking to beware of rootedness in our rootless world, where having roots is suspect, even reactionary. We celebrated rootlessness, the dream of travel, and escape as the best experience. How many of us live/die where we were born?

How language betrays us! Betray as in reveal and subvert. Curtin calls himself a contrarian and relishes contronyms (e.g., betray, fast, sanction, wear, weather, wind up). I’m big on antonyms that our mediated reality turns into identities, e.g., war = peace, progress = regress, bad = good. We see how language reveals much about our muddled thinking, storing clues from the past, and warning us of our illusions.

Guy Debord begins The Society of the Spectacle with a tongue-in-cheek parody of Marx’s opening of Kapital: In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Like Marx’s commodities, spectacles are ‘use values’, but even more removed from the consumer than bubble gum or a sports car, as they happen only in your mind, illusion pure and simple, reality so artfully mediated that you pay your money, enjoy, and blissfully forget and move on to the next instalment.

No Virgil to guide us

Today’s ‘great reset’ just may succeed because we have lost the most important roots, our spirituality, buried beneath a heap of commodity-spectacles. Walking through the forest to the genuinely spectacular Taughannock Falls, Curtin gloomily ponders the massacre of Iroquois two centuries ago and asks: Is there any place on this blood-soaked earth where a semi-conscious person can rest easy?

He sees our descent into our current Hell/abyss as starting with Reagan, enshrining illusion in the White House, his assigning communism to the trash heap of history, his attack on social welfare, and his ignorance of the environment. All the presidents since have been variations on his MAGA—even Clinton and Obama credit Reagan as their inspiration. Reagan certainly helped collapse the Soviet Union, but he turned the US into a one-party state, taking his lead from the moribund communists.

And we accept it, as we are trapped in a simulacrum reality, a closed system, a solipsism.

We have no Virgil to guide us through Hell and set us on the road to enlightenment. Wait! We have AI to do that for us. Our worship of the machine is such that as the machine ‘matures’, we have let it take our place, to think for us, even to simulate emotions, speaking as if emoting. The Turing test. The machine’s goal is Darwinian, too: survival of the fittest. Unless we rediscover the miracle of life, root ourselves in a genuine experience of Reality, take back control from the machine, and even ban or dismantle it where it is harmful.

Curtin is a postmodernist, drawing inspiration from the French Debord and Baudrillard. And looks to Joyce for a way forward. In The Contronymal Cage, he quotes Joyce on the language of Joyce’s English-born Jesuit dean of studies, who speaks a different English from that of the Irish rebel. We must take control of our language, be conscious of where it came from, its roots, and how it is used to keep us trapped now in a simulacrum hyperreality, as language constitutes reality as much as it describes it.

Red pill time

There is no ‘heppi end’ to the stories we weave (or rather that weave us) in the Matrix. Poetry is an escape route, unashamedly subjective, rebellious, and questioning. Another way is the essay, as Curtin knows well, and Edward Said, who argued that his nation, Palestine, is a narrative; that we must tell our stories of distorted reality and oppression to escape the Matrix and root ourselves in unmediated Reality. Throw off Blake’s ‘mind-forged manacles’. Recognize that life is not a dead mechanism but is conscious, that we are part of a conscious universe, not as Sisyphus repeating his tortured, pointless circle of unreality, but as Dante, guided in his spiritual quest by the great minds of the past, teaching us to distinguish the devil from God.

What about virtual reality? It sounds ominous, blurring the line between reality and fantasy, but not if we are aware. That goes for all techno miracles. And I for one would much prefer to take a virtual reality trip to visit Mecca in the 7th c than to squash Nature with a huge carbon footprint just to say ‘Kilroy was here’ in a dystopian 21st c Mecca. We can use technology wisely, even reject it if it destroys Nature, undermines society, and kills my soul.

Though raised a Christian, and admiring Jesus, King, Romero, and all those who have died trying to make peace and justice a reality, Curtin is a secular humanist, not looking to traditional religions for answers to ‘why?’ today. He bemoans our loss of spirituality but doesn’t urge Christians to revive their faith, as I suspect he sees it threadbare. That’s where I point my finger. We need faith! That vacuum in my life led me to Islam as the only faith that is still alive, meaningful in a meaningless late capitalism.

Islam was supposedly backward compared to the progressive West. But looking back now, I would suggest we would be much better off if the age of technology had arrived much more slowly, with a spiritual quest still the goal. The West lost its ailing Catholic spirituality with the Protestant Reformation, as it embraced capitalism and became a false spirituality, a materialism masquerading as spirituality, a treacherous inversion of our most fundamental, radical truth. Islam is slowly breaking its shackles, inflicted by the ‘progressive’ capitalist imperialist countries, which occupied Muslim lands, did the usual rape-and-pillage, and even attempted to erase millions of Muslims in Palestine, stealing their land, their spiritual heritage, which is rooted in the Real. Islam does not need Debord or Baudrillard to tell us that our reality is an illusion, that the ‘modern’ world has lost its soul, that the truth lies in the ‘backward’ world, the precapitalist, spirit-based civilizations. Islam’s immunity to ‘progress’ is its saving grace, as it answers our need for meaning in life, which is timeless, technologyless.

Beware the counterinitiations

René Guénon is the 20th-century thinker who first deconstructed the embrace of modernism in The Crisis of the Modern World (1927). He converted to Islam in the 1930s and embraced a traditional lifestyle, rejecting for the most part the illusory technology of the 20th century for ‘spiritual technologies’, even as our capitalist/ socialist societies pushed ahead to carry out greater and greater monstrosities. We have lost our highest faculty, intellectual intuition, i.e., direct apperception or gnosis. We have lost the very possibility of spiritual realization. The Soviet secular spirituality was the first to collapse, and Russia has returned to its Christian Orthodoxy roots, i.e., there is an exit ramp ‘back to the future’.

Gueon coined the term ‘counterinitiation’, movements that are spiritual doppelgangers that mimic authentic spirituality. Protestantism’s embrace of capitalism is the greatest such ruse, which explains the thousands of evangelical sects all claiming to be true. Now you can fashion your own spirituality with a dash of tarot, yoga, and mindfulness. No! We must rediscover the wisdom of traditional religions, which have been discarded on our highway to nowhere. We need a great cosmic reset. Curtin sees himself as a contrarian, infatuated with contronyms. Language is a powerful repository of wisdom, embedded in great literature, especially poetry. But he doesn’t go the extra mile.

Without a love, not just of words, but of spirituality, sacred words, essays like Curtin’s just depress me. In Hindu lore, we are in the declining period of civilization, known as the Kali Yuga (the Age of Darkness). It began with the rise of agriculture in 3000 BC, which unmoored us from our spiritual roots, embracing money, private property, and slavery. Three thousand years is a long nightmare, but it is also the necessary precursor to renewal, the cosmic reset.

The Arts (I like to use caps for the ‘Real thing’) is our avenue for spiritual truths. Our screeds help us see the world in 4d (virtual reality a gimmicky version of this serious path), connect us with our Real environment, not the phony mediated environment of consumer capitalism. As for sacred vs profane, no, no! Everything is sacred, alive, to be connected with meaningfully, loved/hated. There is no neutral observer. I write with passion, or my writing is dead. And as for mindless rituals. No, no! The ritual of prayer is an active form of knowledge, a path to participate in eternal truths, our metaphysical roadmap, showing us the exit ramp from our highway to know-where. (Don’t you love language?)

JFK and 9/11 litmus tests

Curtin includes a long article about JFK. The Life and Public Assassination of John F Kennedy, one on JFK and Dulles, and The Assassination and Mrs. Paine. His great courage in the face of an assassination he expected can inspire us to oppose the systemic forces of evil that control the United States and are leading the world into the abyss. And one on Bob Dylan (‘our Emerson’) and his 2020 song about the assassination Murder Most Foul (thank you, Hamlet), whose lyrics about the conspiracy are ignored or mocked by our doppelganger media. Neither Dylan nor Walberg is going ‘gentle into that good night’, to quote Bob’s model and namesake Dylan Thomas.

I like Curtin sharing personal experiences. There aren’t any independent, neutral observers or observations. He’s not dogmatic. A 9/11 essay at the Berkshire Edge (not included, a shame as the litmus test these days is where you stand on that elephant-in-the-room) dismisses the official story, assumes a conspiracy of the elite directed by the CIA. As for charges of Israel and Mossad, he’s skeptical both here and on JFK, arguing the CIA is too powerful to let that happen ‘outside the box’. I would point to many instances from the King David Hotel in 1948 to many, many assassinations of Palestinian — any — leaders it doesn’t like (Arafat and hundreds of guerrilla leaders). There is an unspoken hit list always in the creation, much like Ukraine’s Myrotvorets. No group, official or unofficial, comes near to Israel. Bin Laden, eat your heart out.

Personally (remember, no neutral writers!), I think only Israeli terrorists are cynical and smart enough to do such a thing, using Saudi youth as patsies. Funny, Jews have been the world’s leading terrorists since Israel was created, and are exonerated, pointing the finger at the Muslim victims, defending themselves as the real terrorists. Curtin’s mild dissidence/apostasy went unpunished, except for a few comments ridiculing him as another conspiracy nut. I suspect he would have been treated much more severely if he had labeled Israelis, i.e., secular Jewish fanatics, as the perpetrators of JFK’s murder and/or 9/11.

My sense is that Americans are too spooked, too afraid to point the finger at Israel as the villain-in-chief in the world today, largely responsible for our descent into Hell. US-Israel is tattooed on American minds. A spiritual mark of Cain in our dystopia, making sure we are ready for the mental gas chamber. Are tattoos removable? It’s very hard, painful, and leaves a scar. But, hey!, purging yourself of society’s inhumanity is worth it. Down with tattoos! They are haram in Islam with good reason. Our only identity needed to live a good life is identifying with God, trying to perfect ourselves, and getting as close to Him (not ‘him’) as possible. The world and our special place in it are the only proof we need of who we are and where we’re going.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Troy Nahumko.

”Television was a Baby Crawling Towards That Deathchamber. (“It is here, the long Awaited bleap-blast light that Speaks one red tongue like Politician.”)

–Allen Ginsberg, quoted in A Brief Guide to Trump & the Spectacle, by TJ Clark in London Review of Books Vol 47/No. 1

Trump speaks in the name of science but…he does so…to insist that God decreed the immutable character of the two sexes, and that he, Trump, is decreeing it once more..

–Judith Butler, This Is Wrong: On Executive Order 14168, London Review of Books, Vol. 47, No. 6

…any alternatives to authoritarianism must address [the fears being exploited by Trump and his people] with a compelling vision in which there would be security for all those who now fear their own vanishing and the vanishing of their communities...This imagined world…would… refuse all forms of violence in affirming the equality, value and interdependency of all living beings.

–Ibid.

“We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful revelations of the truth. “

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kim C. Domenico.

Image by stefan moertl.

One of the two major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States has allowed an decades-long ethnic cleansing to morph into a genocide, a horror that could be stopped with one phone call; has escalated the drilling of oil and gas despite the existential threat of global warming; forced railroad workers to swallow a bad contract by breaking their strike; and spent his Senate career as an errand boy for banks. And that’s the lesser evil!

Joe Biden really is the lesser evil in this dismal race for the White House, and that such an office holder is easily not the worst candidate is surely sufficient to illustrate the decline of the world’s still extraordinarily dangerous superpower. Out of more than 300 million people, this is the best the country can do? Given the quite understandable reluctance (to put it mildly) for the types of folks who are reading these words to contemplate voting either for President Biden or Donald Trump, what do we do when the lesser evil is so evil that he has the sobriquet “Genocide” attached to his name?

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Dolack.

It was a jarring spectacle to those horrified by the carnage in Gaza. The attention of a nation was focused on a very large ball game while the bombs dropped unabated in a place called Rafah. This southern Gaza city is swollen with Palestinians that have been funneled there as a place of refuge. A million and a half individuals are trapped in this area, and have been relentlessly targeted by Israeli bombing campaigns. There’s simply no place else for them to go now. Israel has succeeded in moving Palestinians south of any planned area that could be used for the Ben Gurion canal project and has effectively created a fish-in-a-barrel situation. With ease and at their leisure they can pick off remaining Palestinians, or even allow time, hunger, and disease to do the clean-up work for them. All the while, photographic evidence of slaughtered and mutilated children shows up on the feeds of all who care to bear witness in between surreal Hunger Games-looking elites yucking it up at the big game.

The murder of so many children has certainly marked the souls of those who have perpetrated such atrocities, not the least of which is one Joseph Biden, self-proclaimed Zionist and the number one recipient of over five million dollars in Israeli lobbyist “support”. It’s not even close, his lone perch at the top heap of dead Palestinian bodies…..the next closest recipients being Robert Menendez, Hillary Clinton, and Mark Kirk (who topped out only in the two-three million range). How much does it cost to do the mental gymnastics to allow for genocide? For those trash humans, there are the above amounts.

To add to the unreal quality of the Super Bowl, Israel was allowed to run an ad for themselves, all the while the bombs dropped, flinging that horrendously imprinting image shared by photographer Ezzedine Al-Muasher of a limbless girl dangling out of a window. But this horrific image is one of hundreds, if not thousands in circulation. Those who care and want a free Palestine force themselves to witness such things because the world doesn’t believe without the proof (and sometimes not even then) but all the while not a single one of us will look at children the same way ever again, without seeing in our mind’s eye those lost to such ghoulish violence. It seems disrespectful to not see them, as if the dead scream “know me and what was done to me– do not look away”. It is a more difficult path in life to see the darkness but to not see it is to become the darkness.

If nothing else, most cultures do not approve of the wanton slaughter of innocents. The times in the past that this has occurred–the eye of history has looked back with horror and disgust. But this current genocide is being viewed by all of us, in real time, yet Israeli officials brazenly make excuses about civilian targeting—this despite multiple videos of snipers taking out individuals clearly doing things like just going for water or attempting to aid an injured person. Trying to cross a street: HAMAS! Trying to get water? HAMAS! Just not wanting to be occupied and murdered……yep, Hamas! At what point is it even so hard to figure out why a portion of the occupied people would want to be….Hamas? If it wasn’t Hamas, it would be some other militant group in defiance. People don’t want to be kettled, occupied and murdered. Actually I think that’s the recipe to use if you want to get a group to hate you with a clear and defined rage. What would the “founding fathers” of the United States be called if they lost? And they were mainly pissed for taxes and other economic reasons, not for living in a clear apartheid state!

I witnessed an interview with an Israeli apologist being asked about the murder of little Hind Rajab. For those not aware, this six-year-old was trapped in a car with dead relatives after their vehicle was attacked. She had the presence of mind to call, while wounded, for help. She thought those in the car with her were “sleeping”. The kind soul on the other end encouraged her to just let them sleep. When the Red Crescent ambulance arrived to help the little girl, they were attacked and killed. The sad scene found days later with Hind dead……one can only imagine the terror of her passing– cold, scared and in pain. This is a work of evil to do this to a child. The interviewee did the usual….oh maybe the ambulance workers were Hamas. Sure. I assume six-year-old Hind was Hamas too. I think at this point maybe even the pope is Hamas. I know I would be included in Hamas for not being thrilled to see slaughtered innocents. It’s lost all meaning, which is exactly what it was designed to do, this mangling of semantics and bodies.

This “everything is Hamas” has been the go-to reason for the willful slaughter of apologists. One wonders how this mentality would work in the United States—that is, when a criminal is in a vicinity, all nearby must be killed? How would that have worked at the ill-fated Chiefs celebration parade in Kansas City? To use Israeli governmental logic, the entire parade should have been attacked and all there killed in an attempt to liquidate the shooters at that event. It’s ludicrous, but the numbers probably about match up with what is going on in Gaza…. get a couple of militants and kill thousands in the process. But of course we know it isn’t about getting Hamas. It’s about wiping out as much of the Palestinian public as possible and the disproportionate number of child victims is no accident.

They are the future and Israel wants to wipe the possibility of a Palestinian future off the map.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathleen Wallace.

At the criminal court in downtown Manhattan today, nothing important happened. Believe me. I was there. There were no meaningful occurrences of true consequence. Certainly nothing worthy of a claim on your limited attention. I wouldn't bring it up at all, except that I fear that my friends and I in the media may be about to gleefully poison this nation, one more time.

One thing about New York City is that it is home to a large population of reporters, of which I am one, that will reliably turn up at any spectacle. Not out of any nefarious motives. We do this for the same reason that residents of small towns turn up at the county fair: It's something to do.

Media is a two-way entertainment business. In order to entertain our audience, we must first be entertained ourselves. Spectacles, therefore, are irresistible. This is okay, even amusing, until the weight of a spectacle grows so large and monopolizes so much of the available energy that it starts feeding itself, investing itself with undue importance purely because everyone is paying it so much attention. Such was the case with the media circus around the arraignment of former President Donald J. Trump over hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Like drinking an entire bottle of vodka, this can all seem like great fun, until you wake up and find that everything around you has been broken.

On Tuesday morning, the east side of Collect Pond Park across the street from the courthouse was lined with tents, each one home to a camera crew from a different national news organization. Many of those cameras were trained on a guy in a breakdancing-style track suit who was spinning a basketball on top of a pole holding an American flag, as he danced back and forth in Rollerblades chanting "Donald. J. Trump. Not. Guilty!" He seemed to be the most newsworthy thing out there.

The park itself, which was ostensibly the site of a protest, was jammed with a crowd that was about 80% press, 15% police and 5% people who had come to protest or counterprotest on one side or the other. Any lunatic who wanted to don a MAGA hat or wave a "FUCK TRUMP" flag and make their way downtown was likely to be photographed and patiently interviewed by multiple power-suited TV newspeople who would nod and maintain a look of professionalism, no matter how stupid the words flowing from the person's mouth were. One man wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and a rubber Trump mask told a reporter, with great seriousness, "I don't really give interviews, because I don't sound like him." We, the press, were all here, and we needed content. There was no one to blame but ourselves.

Even the Proud Boys and antifa, usually reliable telegenic opponents on the field of pointless political battle, did not bother showing up to this event, leaving the desperate reporters crowding around a single guy with a Trump hat on his head and a small dog in a cart at his side.

At last, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the bombastic Georgia fool (and Republican House representative), showed up to give her speech. Or so I was told. Though I was only feet away from her alleged location, I could not see her through the tightly packed forest of cameras, and I could not hear her thanks to one determined opponent who continually blew an orange plastic whistle as long as she was speaking. Eventually her security detail pushed through the chaotic crowd and the person I assume to be Greene left the park, trailing a cloud of media like a comet's tail.

After that, there was nothing much left except the freaks and predators astute enough to come and sponge up the free press. New York Rep. Jamal Bowman was there, saying some things, along with a performance artist who smeared white paint all over her skin and screamed "Fuck white people!" until the police strongly encouraged her to leave the park.

Here and there, some die-hard MAGA people who had come in to support their pagan god milled about, looking a little aimless. I asked two women from Texas wearing Trump t-shirts where else they planned to go in the big city after the rally. "Probably nowhere," one said. "I'm not risking my life to be out in New York City. You all have rapes, murders, right in the streets here, with Bragg letting all the criminals go." This was pure delusion. It's true that waltzing around New York in a Trump hat puts you at risk for public humiliation, but other than that, it's a pretty safe city. It's easy to lay this sort of thinking at the doorstep of Fox News, but if we are being honest, your local news can produce this same sort of fearful hallucination on a local scale.

There are plenty of important things happening in America right now. Florida has just effectively banned abortion. Vital elections are taking place in Chicago and Wisconsin. In Los Angeles, a labor dispute threatens to shut down Hollywood. All of these things will have a profound material impact on millions of people's lives. The hundreds of reporters in Manhattan today were not covering any of these things. They were covering the guy on rollerblades instead. We will never know how many more important stories did not get told because we were all out in this park full of cretins.

Some will say, "Isn't the historic arraignment of a former United States President important as well?" And I say to you: No. It's not. Not really.

Donald Trump walking in and getting his mug shot taken is not important in the same way that a woman in Florida being forced to have a baby she doesn't want due to the brutal and cowardly actions of her state's elected leaders is important.

A single pool reporter with a notebook and an iPhone could cover the Trump arraignment just as effectively as dozens of CNN satellite teams can, because there is not really very much happening, when you get right down to it. I don't want to be an old crank here. I like spectacle. I am a reporter on the far margins of national news, and that is where spectacle belongs.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Hamilton Nolan.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nolan Higdon.