Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

"Premonitions of the Twilight": I had  intended to illustrate this essay with a red-hued variant, but decided -- for reasons I can't yet verbalize except to say they  relate to both the Celtic deity   Morrigan and the Norse notion of  Götterdämmerung -- the blue variant is more appropriate. A "sandwich"-- a photo collage -- the imagery is from some of my 1967 camera work. (Loren Bliss ©1968,1974,2025)  

*****

FOR ME, THE death of the American Republic and the threatened death of our Mother Earth called into question a notion that had been the one certain conviction within  my personal ethos of general agnosticism: that each and every atom in the entire cosmos contained within itself not just the known structure of nucleus, electrons and protons but an unseen, undetected yet overwhelmingly powerful inertial momentum toward consciousness. Influenced by collegiate studies in astronomy, I had concluded sentient life could not have come into existence -- could not have "evolved from the substance of the stars" (as one professor put it) -- without  such a positive dynamic.

Our matriarchal ancestors recognized this force and anthropomorphized it as the Great Goddess, the Mother of All Being, which to me feels more metaphorically apt than any other hypothesis about our cosmic source and often – in my younger years whenever I was amidst wilderness or at sea or otherwise beyond urban distractions -- felt objectively real, as it ever-more-frequently does now in the meditative solitude of my final years. 

But I would be dishonest were I not to confess that the outcome of 5 November spawned the most painful doubts I have ever known. For a terrible few weeks I believed the election’s ultimate message is that our undetected atomic dynamics are in fact ruled by a much stronger negative force, an antithetical inertial momentum that redefines the universe itself. It tells us what we foolishly view as the inexpressibly beautiful choreography of creation is instead a maliciously seductive dance of destruction, the final revelation of which -- our last lesson as a doomed species on a dying planet we ourselves have fatally wounded -- is naught but its unspeakable hideousness.

Such was my own woundedness, challenged at last by phenomena I could not ignore: near-nightly dreams of intellectually and emotionally supportive, physically affectionate young women, each woman a stranger, yet each eerily familiar; two wide-awake occasions when, while sitting alone amongst this apartment-building’s courtyard gardens, I was joined by a solitary raven who perched on a branch less than an arms length distant in comfortably shared contemplative solitude; and then finally a wide-awake, seemingly coincidental encounter with a young woman of skill and wisdom, whose interpretation of these events -- all the more meaningful because she did not know my cardiologist says I'll probably be dead by September -- was phrased in modern English but identical to the promise contained in an ancient lay of magick cited by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, his life-changing epic of spiritual and aesthetic revolution: “Thus shalt thou be fetch-ed hame.” 

*****

DESPITE OUR SPECIES' rightfully terrified, head-in-the-sand refusal to acknowledge it, Trump's victory in the 5 November election makes permanent the U.S. government’s formerly undeclared policy -- first publicly exemplified  by President Carter's endorsement of the viciously misogynistic Hyde Amendment -- of reversing all the humanitarian advancements that resulted from the U.S. Civil War and World War II. It is now as if the Confederacy won in 1865 and Hitler triumphed in 1945 -- and with every passing day, it becomes more undeniable we must soon anticipate the methodical reversal of every humanitarian gain our species ever achieved.

Meanwhile, given the new regime's brazenly public affirmation of the nation's  rejection of all moral, ethical and constitutional restraint, a renewed Holocaust – the zero-tolerance, no-exception extermination of all "enemies within" – becomes ever more likely, not only in the U.S., but throughout U.S. capitalism's neoliberalism- nazified global empire.

With the Soviet Union slain, its Red Army disbanded and every nation terrified to submission by the U.S. empire's bipartisan "Better-Dead-Than-Red" intent -- its pledge to fulfill Hitler's last-minute yearning to destroy the world -- Trump and his like-minded predecessors, whether overt (Reagan et al) or clandestine (Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, Clinton ad nauseam), have already achieved der Führer's intended subjugation of  the entire planet. What we are witnessing now is not the conquest but its consequence -- the triumph of Absolute Evil.

Protected by modern technology in fulfillment of the doomsday purpose that is the sole motive for its invention, it is increasingly possible the Christonazi Reich cannot be overthrown. The promised thermonuclear enforcement of “Better Dead Than Red” guarantees no nation will ever dare attempt Trump's overthrow from without, and it seems increasingly probable We the (Humanitarian) People are congenitally unable to evolve the courage, solidarity and discipline to subverted it from within. This would mean Christonazism is literally "forever" -- that is, until the end of human time itself. Or at the very least, that it will reign supreme until some apocalyptic event neutralizes the weaponry that perpetuates its terrorism. In either case, our species is not likely to survive. Neither is our Mother Earth, already threatened with reduction to a world uninhabitable by any conceivable life form and thus to permanent Precambrian lifelessness. Those are the horrors to which we unconditionally submit if we surrender. And that is precisely why we must fight on even when it seems hopeless.

Perhaps the words of Jean-Paul Sartre can help us find our own strength:

“We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, as Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our suppressors wanted us to accept. And because of this we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment... And the choice that each of us made of his life was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death... And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered "No.”

Or perhaps we will find inspiration in the wrenching example of the courageous defenders of Fortress Brest, whose valiant resistance is here accurately portrayed in a 2010 historical-reenactment film. The Brest garrison was as doomed as that of Wake Island, and like that sadly forgotten stand by U.S. Marines, the Red Army’s defense of Brest was one of our species’ greatest epics of bravery and heroism. It is entirely appropriate the Brest film has earned “best-such-work-ever” ratings from a number of European critics; and it should vex us severely the equally courageous Wake Island fight is not similarly memorialized.

Perhaps too, after the fate of the Martyred Minnesotans leaves no doubt We the (Humanitarian) People are mortally jeopardized by badge-protected gangs of run-amok thugs – no matter whether they are assassins disguised as cops sicced on us by Christonazi Obersturmbannführers or the real cops and soldiers likewise conditioned to robotic obedience and ordered by Trump and his MAGAstapo Chief Kristi Noem to “liberate” any cities allegedly compelled by “socialism” to defend its residents’ Constitutional rights -- we will at last awaken to the magnitude of the Evil that assails us.

And perhaps we will even re-awaken to the lesson taught us by the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Perhaps – realizing we are all now potential targets of roving Christonazi assassins – we will at long last unshackle ourselves from the pseudo-left’s suicidal, useful-idiot collaboration with Christonazism implicit in its fanatical, “all-gun-owners-are-fascists” insistence on forcible civilian disarmament, repeal of the Second Amendment and the vindictive, “politically correct” imposition of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood. As my Distinguished Rifleman father often said, “It is far better to have a firearm but not need it, than to need a firearm but not have it.” To which I, a military-qualified Expert with the M1911 .45-caliber service pistol, will add only that, “it is far better we have trained and practice-sustained skill with firearms, but no immediate need for it, than to discover – often terminally – we desperately need the skill but tragically lack it.”

Additionally, given the unprecedentedly grim future that looms – an astrologer friend tells me the planetary configurations on the U.S. Sibley Chart are like the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War Two combined, and many psychics claim Trump is the actual reincarnation of Hitler – I have three categories of cautions for my fellow activists.

• First is an axiomatic statement by Lev Bronstein, the “nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn” known to history as Leon Trotsky: “In every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”

• Second is the axiom that governs the craft of intelligence analysis: Once is coincidence; twice is suspicious; three times is enemy action.”

• Third is a five-point body of self-protective, keep-your-head-down advice that can be as life-saving for non-violent protestors as it is for soldiers: (1)-Learn and practice the mindfulness necessary for situational awareness – that is, the art of paying attention, of knowing at all times what is going on around you – which is an acquired skill (one that, thanks to my father, I learned in childhood); (2)-Learn first aid; consult local service centers for information about free courses; once trained, never forget its three basic principles, still the same as the U.S. Army taught me 66 years ago: “keep ‘em breathing; stop the bleeding; treat for shock”; (3)-Learn to identify cover (that which will turn bullets and maybe even grenade or shell fragments) and distinguish it from concealment (that which merely hides you); note that contrary to Hollywood, motor vehicles are not effective cover; (4)-Learn to do the low crawl and other individual movement techniques, which can save your life if protests come under fire; (5)-Learn these additional self-protective techniques for surviving gunfire in urban areas.

(I offer the above with unapologetic acknowledgment the pseudo-left is sure to be antagonized by the sources of some of its content.)

*****

TWO HEADLINES WE will never see in mainstream media:

Assured of Pardons, Gleeful Christonazis Run Amok,
Slaying, Beating and Jailing Führer Trump's Opponents

and

Trumpites Weaponize Social Security, Veterans Benefits,
Medicare, Entire Safety Net to Enforce Christonazi Theocracy

As usual, the true significance of these atrocities is methodically suppressed, not only by the mainstream media, but by our alleged leaders as well. 

In the first instance, it is now axiomatic the penalties for opposing der neu Führer include extrajudicial murder. (Given the 100-percent corruption of the nation’s law-enforcement agencies and military-command structure by Christonazification, were I a gambling man, which I am not, I’d have bet substantial sums the Minnesota murderer would be allowed to escape. Now that he has finally been captured, I’d bet the Trump Regime ensures he escapes punishment with an insanity plea and then later, when no one is looking, grants him a full pardon.)

Meanwhile, let us not forget there is no question Vance Boelter was doing the regime’s intended work.

Apropos the second headline – and very much an extension of the first – do not for a moment doubt that Trump and his cabal of Christonazi/Neoconfederate terrorists are now able to vindictively stop federal disbursements including individual Social Security checks literally at will, thereby silencing (and no doubt murdering by the resultant starvation and homelessness) any stipend-dependent retired or disabled person who dares criticize the new Führer by whom We the (Humanitarian) People,  our nation, our species and our Mother Earth are now cursed. The real story – the terrible truth too many of us are too naive, too stupid or simply too deluded by fear to acknowledge — is that there is literally no limit to the horrors that are to be inflicted on us. Hence a third headline we will never see in mainstream media:

MAGA Is Christonazism’s Renewed Holocaust: It Repeals
Many People’s Right to Live – or Even to Survive Beyond Birth 

But that is the ultimate truth of it, displayed with murder-weapon potency by 18 June's sure-to-be-fatal Supreme Court ruling that transgender people have no right to be born or continue living in the United States. It was predictably announced with all the smirking, pridefully self-righteous sadism that historically defines Christianity as manifest Evil, and it just as predictably furthers the process of turning the Christian cross into a symbol as ominously threatening as the Original Nazis' swastika. It is the most genocidal triumph yet of Trump’s adaptation of Hitler’s master plan, the subjugation of a nation by capturing its judiciary, and the victors are gloating accordingly.

The most our so-called progressive leaders are doing -- in all probability the most they will ever do – is  suppress or downplay the unmitigated horrors of Trumpite intent. Beyond that -- and I am speaking of the entire “Democratic” (sic) pseudo-opposition -- all they do is rationalize their submissiveness and whimper. Were they not irremediably compromised by their (morally imbecilic) terror of fomenting anti-capitalist revolution,  they would recognize they owe us the service of at least acknowledging our true plight. But they have abandoned us to the conquering Christonazis as surely as they have forsaken their sworn duty to defend our (former) Constitution.

Of course the Mainstream Media Monopoly— the world’s first (and no doubt last) privately owned, for-maximum-profit variant of Goebbels’ Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, the infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda — has downplayed or suppressed these facts entirely, and most of the so-called alternative media does likewise due to  amateurish incompetence, demographic isolation,  masochistic faithfulness to the Fifth Column Democrats  or some combination thereof. 

Whether by intention or ineptitude, such censorship perpetuates the submissiveness and denial fostered by the national cults of mandatory optimism and prideful ignorance and the Trump Regime’s open encouragement of genocidal bigotry. It camouflages the regime’s murderous intent. It also hides the appropriately terrifying fact the regime’s illegal but permanent termination of public-assistance privacy renders us all vulnerable to ruinous political ambush of the sort that was inflicted on me in December 1982 by a vengeful disciple of Hitler who was protectively closeted in the Washington State Department of Employment Security. Remembering me as one of the leaders of the group of male and female GI Bill students who got her fired from Western Washington State College in 1971 for illegally attempting to expel us in  retaliation for our anti-Vietnam-War activism, she deleted my entire unemployment-compensation file, leaving me without any income whatsoever, destroying a promising career-change in mid-process and forcing my return to New York City, where I found immediate re-employment in the working press. 

In response to my enraged protests -- I repeatedly badgered every Washington state politico I knew -- the department (eventually) paid me the thousand-plus dollars of unemployment compensation I would otherwise have received. But by then I’d been back in the City six months, so the money hardly mattered. And cashing the check formally ended my ability to seek the revenge I was due for the Hitlerite’s ruinously felonious malfeasance, which thus went entirely unpunished.

Such is capitalism in action even during the best of times, with favoritism guaranteeing the bureaucrats are often as corrupt as the politicians themselves. What now threatens us is infinitely worse -- for many inconceivably so.     

****

LET US THEN review our situation:

Recent history proves the “Republican” (sic) Party is -- both literally and figuratively -- operating under a false flag. Its proper name is implicit in its  Christonazi/Neoconfederate identity. Its true flag is therefore most assuredly not the Stars and Stripes of our slain Republic. Its true banners -- brazenly displayed during the attempted coup of 6 January 2020 and in Charlottesville, Virginia in the 11-12 August 2017 prelude to the martyrdom of Heather Heyer  -- are instead  the swastika of the 17-million-victim Nazi German Holocaust and the Stars and Bars of the 750,000-casualty Confederate mutiny that would have set the South  apart as the slavemasters' white male supremacist Christian theocracy. 

Its ideology is  a nightmare symbiosis of methodically resurrected  Ku-Klux-Klan bigotry intensified by Christianity's self-righteous murderousness sharpened to conquering lynch-mob fanaticism by the cunning application of strategy and tactics perfected by Adolf Hitler and refined into the Mein-Kampf equivalents of the  Powell Memo and Project 2025.   The result is an avowedly ecogenocidal  manifestation of Absolute Evil maliciously vectored by a political party that has become a white Christian version of the Taliban. It has made itself unstoppably powerful by its conquest of the entire federal apparatus, at least 28 of the 50 state governments and every law-enforcement agency in the nation.

The same history proves the “Democratic” (sic) Party, irremediably compromised by its role in the coup of 22 November 1963, is actually the  Fifth Column – that is, the clandestine subversion unit – of the Christonazi/Neoconfederate kampfbund. The resultant institutional reality is unalterable by anything short of genuine revolution because both parties, their elected officials and their supportive bureaucracies are the wholly owned properties and puppets of the capitalist ruling class. Government  policies whether federal, state or local are therefore the increasingly brazen expression of ruling class will, which -- as proven by its nauseatingly repetitive Triangle-Shirtwaist,  Blair Mountain and Bhopal atrocities -- is always the forcible extraction of maximum profit with minimal cost to itself and maximal victimization of its workers.

Now the ruling class is replacing us with computers, robots and artificial intelligence – exiling us to permanent unemployment,  fatal poverty and boiling revolutionary anger -- and in fearful response, with chaos and political sleight-of-hand to cover its intent, it is  obviously intent on eliminating those of us they deem "surplus" by  renewing the Holocaust,   with Trump as  Führer. The capitalists clearly expect him to Christonazify as many as he can,  exterminate the rest of us and march any survivors into  inescapable slavery. 

History also tells us this failed nation’s citizenry now has only a Potemkin Village of socioeconomic or political representation and is thus  reduced, de facto, to the disempowered defenselessness  that precedes enslavement. Many of our fellow citizens have been methodically battered to slavery's silent submissiveness by neoliberalism’s decades of social-Darwinism. Already they are too fretfully obsessed by the dire necessities of day-to-day survival to dare make any effort to restore the Constitution slain by the voters on 5 November 2025.  Many younger silent submissives  see no reason to try; their embittered  complaint -- "your Constitution was never protected us even when it was supposedly still in full force" -- is increasingly the defining truth of U.S. politics.

Though the slaying of the Constitution began with 1954's addition of "under God" to the "Pledge of Allegiance" -- the capitalized "G" is  de facto recognition  of the sadistic deity of Christian theocracy; the "under" declares him our omnipotent master -- its slow-motion murder did not become overwhelmingly obvious until Carter the Clandestine Theocrat declared war against women with his  comments about the Hyde Amendment in 1977. Here we encounter both a vivid example of  the party's post-JFK  Fifth-Column function and an apt prelude  to its present-day Neville Chamberlain treachery. Thus was misogyny made official federal policy, not by the nazified Republican Ronald Reagan, as we often incorrectly assume, but by a Democrat's controversial legislative ambush.        

Whether or not this sort of betrayal is a  silent submissive's  sole experience of political truth seems immaterial; the same hopeless sense of inescapable powerlessness afflicts even many citizens who are old enough to remember when the U.S. was -- at least for most whites -- a genuinely democratic republic and a notably comfortable realm in which to live. Who then are these persons? I suspect they're the dominant segment of the 36.1 percent who did not vote in November and the vast majority of the approximately 94 percent of anti-Trump voters who refuse to protest now. (See "largest protest" link, below, for an authoritative estimate of the demonstrators' numbers.) Though the submissives  include many who regard Christonazism as repugnant, it appears they are too abjectly fearful to ever find the courage to openly oppose the unmitigated horror of the Christonazi onslaught. Young or old, I suspect the degree of their submissiveness is a  measurement of the extent to which they've internalized the futility-of-hope factor paradoxically implicit in Ayn Rand's toxic ethos of  self-obsessed moral imbecility, the neoliberal credo  with which we're all perpetually dosed by mainstream media and the brain-policing that passes for education.

Undoubtedly by intent, neoliberalism is suppressing our individual and collective capability for humanitarian empathy. Robbing us of our ability to achieve solidarity, the resultant politically terminal deficiency was first exemplified by the gradual deterioration of '60s radicalism into the late-'70s Me-Generation avarice that would define the entire decade of the '80s. By 2012, this Ayn Rand poison  -- its aggressive self-obsession now bolstered by open scorn for empathy -- was strong enough to kill Occupy within a few months. The movement thus collapsed  into the spasms of egotistic clashes and identity-politics squabbling that enabled its defeat by  government forces. In retrospect, it seems obvious Occupy was destroyed to  clear  the way for Hillary, which appears now to have been the plausibly deniable guarantee of Trump's ascendance. 

Though Trump unquestionably spearheads capitalism’s inevitable transformation into hard-core nazism, his  buffoonish or erratic behavior makes it difficult for some people to recognize him as  a genuinely apocalyptic threat  It's not an uncommon ploy; the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy disguised himself as a clown. Too many people thus continue to dismiss Trump's genocidal rhetoric as political hyperbole, sensational but ultimately meaningless. Nevertheless, his predatory purpose becomes more undeniable with every outrage. Obviously he intends to complete the  nullification of the Constitution, thereby rewarding the vengefully white-male-supremacist Neoconfederates by forever reversing the outcome of the (first?) Civil War. He would  simultaneously reward the Christonazis  by enabling them to  transform  the nation into a theocratic American variant of Hitler's Germany. Their plan is to make the former U.S. a new Auschwitz,  invisibly fenced and policed by inescapable electronic surveillance,  a continent-sized death camp for exterminating everyone on their  hate lists – note again not only Boelter’s intended victims  but the approximately 300,000 transgender children the Supreme Court just added to their targets. Once the corpses have been ground and baked to fertilizer and the execution-complexes converted to Disneylands and shopping malls, the former Republic would become a theocratic re-education camp for  cradle-to-grave zero-tolerance  Christonazi mind-warping.

Given the regime's stated intent to weaponize science as a tool of theocracy, I cannot doubt its agenda includes research to determine if it is possible to genetically detect LGBTQ tendencies at birth -- with immediate extermination for any newborn in whom such tendencies are diagnosed -- and death as heretics  for any parents who dare protest.

Our masters and their puppets would have us believe the horrors inflicted on us by the 5 November vote are  an anomaly that will be undone by next year's congressional midterms. That is another Big Lie. Trump has repeatedly stated his election is to be the nation's last. Compelling circumstantial evidence indicates his emergence as Führer  fulfills the intent of  the Bankers’ Plot the retired Marine General Smedley Butler heroically interdicted in  1933. A Wall Street scheme to make the U.S. a satellite of Nazi Germany, its details still remain so classified we have to google at least half-a-dozen  sources to obtain even a vague indication of its magnitude and depth.  (Note especially the indications of ruling-class-mandated  grants of presidential and congressional immunity that in 1934 and early 1935 seem to have given the plotters the protected status of  a de facto permanent working group, a clandestine precursor to the infamous Trump/Musk Department of Government Efficiency.)  Ninety years later – precisely as we witness in the transgender atrocity – its outrages are routinely approved by a Supreme Court deliberately packed with Christonazis  specifically chosen to legitimize the new Führer’s will. As we of the (real) left repeatedly sought to warn the nation, this is  an especially glaring  example of how the Trump  applies the strategies and tactics his  messiah Hitler used to conquer the Weimar Republic.

Another adaptation of Hitler’s blueprint for subversion, the nazification of schoolchildren, has been accomplished by decades of psychological conditioning vectored by mandatory reading of Ayn Rand’s fictionalizations of the Mein Kampf/übermenschen ethos. The result guarantees Trump’s “Unified Reich” a new, official, easily metastasized, infinitely malignant national mindset. In its utterly merciless Trumpite/Christonazi/Neoconfederate intensity, it is a relentlessly ecogenocidal symbiosis of fanatical selfishness, prideful ignorance, sadistic bigotry and murderous anti-intellectualism that is tyranically hostile to any humanitarian instinct or desire for collective human kindness. Above all else, it is obscenely eager to manifest the public hatefulness legitimized by the Atlas-Shrugged (Elon Musk) variant of nazism. Thus it is not only absurd but clinically delusional to imagine the Trumpites have any potential for conversion to humanitarianism. The terrible magnitude of their triumph is in fact proven by the chronic absence of (effective) opposition; the silent submissives I described above are in actuality among the initial victims of  the Trumpite kampfbund's  weaponization of Ayn Rand's  brand of moral imbecility.  Though Rand proclaimed herself an atheist, the Christonazis sanctify her by filtering  her venom through their prosperity gospel, using her sociopathy to reinforce their assertion that  greed is good and ecogenocidal greed is truly godly. 

Thus the global aristocrats and their lynch-mob puppets celebrate with infinitely sadistic glee -- the aristocrats because they now have official permission to sedate themselves with a suicidal orgy of ecogenocidal avarice as terminal climate change hooks our species from the cosmic stage and drops the final curtain on the misogynistic war against our Mother Earth.  The Christonazis and Neoconfederates -- incorrigibles every one -- celebrate because they view Trump's “Unified Reich” as the obliteration of each and every humanitarian achievement, the reversal of evolution for which they and their doctrinal forebears have always so hatefully yearned. Make no mistake; this blitzkrieg of malignancy -- with unimaginably worse to come -- is what we face. Welcome to the suffocating darkness of our species' darkest most apocalyptic Dark Age --  precisely why I dearly hope my cardiologist's estimate of my longevity proves accurate.    

*****

MY PESSIMISM ABOUT the U.S. potential to evolve an effective liberation movement is by no means unsupported. In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken began lamenting the growing dominance of our national cult of prideful ignorance and compulsory stupidity. In the 1950s, Vance Packard documented the extent to which we were already conditioned to reliably abject conformity and submissiveness. In 1992, a year after the defeat and destruction of the Soviet Union, Canadian media ferreted out a particularly damning Soviet estimate that characterized the U.S. as lacking adequate revolutionary potential even during the allegedly radical 1960s and early 1970s.

As best I recall – I apologetically confess I have not yet recovered the requisite source material despite how carefully I originally filed it away¹ -- it was Maclean’s Magazine that so scooped the world. It reported the conclusion of the Committee for State Security (KGB) that while the U.S. minority communities of Blacks, Hispanics and First Nations peoples had indeed evolved the consciousness prerequisite to successful revolution, the revolutionary intent seemingly manifest by most of the Caucasians who supported the civil rights, anti-military-draft, anti-Vietnam War, feminist and environmentalist movements was merely a charade, a fad, a false consciousness that would vanish (or revert to existential-fascist norms) as soon as circumstances allowed. Implicit in the analysts’ view was their recognition most U.S. whites were even then too cowardly for the hazardous work of revolution and were already too aggressively self-centered to grow the requisite solidarity with other victims of capitalism.

The absolute correctness of the KGB’s dismaying hypothesis was proven beyond equivocation by the breathtaking speed with which U.S. whites abandoned all anti-war activism after abolition of the draft on 27 January 1973. Nearly all the white activists, most of them university students, instantly returned to the conventionally exploitative pursuits that define the capitalist elite, ignoring the fact the war raged on until 30 April 1975. The late Jerry Rubin, pseudo-revolutionary turned unapologetic Me-Generation millionaire, was typical.

White feminism reversed itself too, albeit less obviously. What had begun as an expansion of the anti-patriarchal mindfulness that defines Marxism was reduced to an ideologically reactionary campaign for individual achievement of implicitly white-supremacist petite bourgeois advantage and the fostering of anti-male hatred, all within the context of improving capitalism. Its hate-mongering built an impenetrable barrier to solidarity and served as the springboard for the identity politics that have since combined with neoliberalism-maximized moral imbecility  to thrust revolutionary socialist solidarity seemingly forever beyond U.S. reach.

Around the same time – a trend I witnessed as an adjunct-faculty photography instructor c. 1975-1981 -- environmentalism began rejecting its initial Earth Day diversity and deteriorating into an elitist, esoterica-segregated movement that in symbiosis with what might be termed Nurdism would achieve its ultimate notoriety with its belief – audible in the increasingly white-male-supremacist groves of environmental and computer-science academia nearly three decades before Eric Pianka made it public in 2006 – that a pandemic that killed off 90 percent of the global human population was the only way to save our Mother Earth from the permanent reduction back to the Precambrian lifelessness that looms as the consequence of our masters’ thermonuclear, biochemical and industrial follies. Though Pianka never urged such a Final Solution, nor identified its targets, it was always obvious the vast majority of victims would come from the working class, the 99.9 percent of our species who are forever dependent on paychecks for survival.

As for how the ruling class would survive any pandemic it would presumably unleash,  by the late 1970s, the bankers were already building bunkers.

Significantly, the sorts of ideological reversals that followed the ‘60s are a defining characteristic of U.S. political history: note the transformations of the Republicans and the Democrats, the former from Abolitionist to Conservative to Christonazi/Neoconfederate, the latter from pro-slavery stalwarts to advocacy of the New Deal and then their post-JFK retreat to functioning as the Christonazi/Neoconfederate Fifth Column. Note too the transformation of Reconstruction to Jim Crow, its relief via the (brief) Civil Rights interregnum followed by the (probably permanent) reversion to the genocidal racism of Christonazism.  These transformations illustrate how the effective the slavemaster-minded capitalist ruling class is – and always has been -- at conditioning the white majority to self-destructively shackle itself with hard-right ideology whenever its grievances intensify enough to threaten humanitarian revolution or even provoke attempts at significant reform.

It is something of an aside, but in the above pattern we witness history's unequivocal refutation of our species' ultimate Big Lie: the historically false notion the "moral arc" of the universe "bends toward justice." Bend it does, though any honest reading of the data proves its curvature  under patriarchy is exclusively toward ever-more-inescapably apocalyptic tyranny. We also see that as the arc of patriarchal history curves toward ever-more-advanced technology, it merges with and becomes indistinguishable from the curve of tyranny.

Was pre-patriarchal history any different? The misogyny-tabooed scholarship by Marija Gimbutas, Alexander Marshack, Gerald Hawkins, Barry Fell, Gavin Menzies, Barbara Mor and Robert Graves tell us it surely was – that in societies which evolved as extensions of motherhood, the source-model and psychodynamic  impetus of matriarchy, technological advancements were  shared for collective benefit rather than weaponized as assets of tyranny. Cooperation -- not competition -- was the primary means of survival.  Otherwise we  could not have sustained ourselves  through at least 300 millennia of ice ages and epic geological disasters. In profoundly alarming contrast, the imposition of patriarchy -- by talking snakes, burning wheels in the sky and self-proclaimed deities that descend to earth in thunderous clouds of smoke and fire -- has brought us to the brink of terminal apocalypse in a mere six thousand years, a terrifying nemesis that suggests patriarchy is indeed the cosmic equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets.  

The resultant lynch-mob nazism of the white U.S. working class is often affirmed in blood, as in the 1921 Tulsa massacre, or when an estimated 400 white construction workers and 800 white office workers attacked, savagely beat and hospitalized hundreds of peace demonstrators in New York City on 8 May 1970. That atrocity, encouraged by openly approving  cops, resoundingly applauded by leaders of both major parties and endorsed by most of the nation’s labor unions, is an obvious prelude to the present-day atrocities perpetrated – invariably with obvious police support – by the Neoconfederates, the Christonazis and the Trumpite kampfbund in general, the membership of which continues to grow. Aristocrat or lumpenproletarian, not  a one of their sort would ever accept socialism; the former have mandated the relentless indoctrination of the latter by their churches to reject  socialism as demonic, by their schools to fear it as enslavement and by mass media to regard it as a euphemism for race-mixing, homosexuality and emasculation.

Not only is their fanatical bigotry and methodically sustained ignorance irremediable; it has always been, as documented by Steven Hahn in Illiberal America (W.W. Norton & Company: 2004) – the definitive ethos of the nation's white majority. Now -- and probably forever -- it is the triumphantly official policy of  the federal government. Eventually it will the prescribed dogma  of all but a coastal dozen of the 50 states.  It is  irrefutable proof the U.S. is now as purposefully hateful as the Germany it inspired. Apropos which, see James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press: 2017).

To understand the true bottomlessness of our enemy’s sociopathy, read “The Last Article,” here. As I have said elsewhere, the Lyudmila Pavlichenko formulation applies to the whole blood-thirsty lot, leaders and followers alike: they are indeed “fascists not humans.”

But now there may be a tiny defiant flicker of fiery hope within the all-smothering darkness. Trump's sneeringly sadistic, Pinochet-caliber "economic shock therapy" -- runaway food-price inflation sneakily imposed by tariffs and mass deportations  (lean ground beef up 68 percent in a single month) -- is growing the resistance with a speed as apparently unprecedented as the true-but-censored rate of inflation itself. Thus the 14 June anti-Trump "No Kings" campaign produced what are now said to be  the largest protest demonstrations in U.S. history. And as it says in "Biko," Peter Gabriel's evocative anti-apartheid anthem,² "Once the flames begin to catch/the wind will blow it higher."

__________________

¹In 2004, as a result of family treachery – the ultimate triumph of an older, now-dead half-sibling who had long despised me – I was evicted from the rural, forest-and-garden acreage I had been assured would be my home for as long as I chose to remain there. I’m now guessing that during the resultant move – of necessity made in great haste and under constant threat of violence – I accidentally disposed of the relevant file. But I am still searching for it – I have two four-drawer filing cabinets of material to sort – and if I do find it, I will post it as bibliographical references.

²A musically superior  "Biko," unfortunately marred by an intrusively discordant introduction of musicians following the performance, is here. 

(For M, in recognition and gratitude.) 

LB/30 January-20 June 2025

-30

THOUGH THERE WAS was much to celebrate in the results of the 6 November 2012 balloting – especially the senatorial triumph of a woman who genuinely terrifies the One Percent – it was nevertheless the worst election night of my life: dread and circuses, with dread winning by a landslide.

That's because the voters of this Ayn Rand backwater to which I was long ago exiled by the gentrification of Manhattan are again using their ballots to sneer “Fuck You” at anyone who's dependent on public transport.

Not that I am surprised. Those of us who are transit riders, pedestrians and bicyclists have long been openly despised by a substantial majority of the wealthier suburbanites here, and now possibly we are being targeted by a majority even within the city limits of Tacoma.

It would not be incorrect to label this bigotry a movement – the Anti-Transit-User-Movement. Its well-financed hatefulness has coalesced into cultoid deification of automobiles and pickup trucks as ultimate symbols of “Americanism” and “the Pacific Northwest Lifestyle”: it is literally a car cult, as unique to the Puget Sound region as the cargo cults were to remote South Pacific islands.

Its disciples fume against bicycles, trains and buses as proofs of conspiracy against their imaginary “right to drive” – in ugly reality their self-obsessed, morally imbecilic compulsion to isolate themselves in mechanized armor and mercilessly bully anyone who is not similarly equipped.

The car cultists are road rage personified. They demonstrate their autocentric hatred by refusing to slow their vehicles for bicyclists or yield the right-of-way to obviously disabled people in crosswalks; they spew invective – “get a job, you lazy bum” – at those of us waiting at bus stops; most of all they flock to the polls at every opportunity to vote against transit and thereby continue their relentless assault against transit-users.

And yes it is that personal – as personal as a fist in the face. The insurmountable hardships these anti-bus-rider voters will gleefully inflict on me if they're successful – the lethal misery they will happily impose on anyone whose circumstances are similar to my own – robbed the election of all the joy it would otherwise have evoked.

Make no mistake: I applaud the victory of President Barack Obama, which – or so I desperately hope – has slowed the Ruling Class effort to impose a new form of Nazism on the United States. I am delighted the voters of Washington have apparently elected Jay Inslee governor – and have thereby beaten back the One Percent's attempt to turn this state into another Wisconsin.

I am pleased these same voters have endorsed marriage equality and legalized possession of marijuana, the latter a defiant protest against the federal government's sadistically punitive, implicitly racist War on Drug Users.

Above all else I cheer the election of Elizabeth Warren, the new senator from Massachusetts whose victory pledge – “I won't just be your senator, I'll be your champion” – promises a potentially revolutionary revitalization of the entire Democratic Party. (Perhaps that explains why slightly more than half her speech, including the pledge itself, is now being suppressed by the corporate news monopolies.)

Warren's apparent fragility paradoxically emphasizes her indomitable strength, a purely female manifestation of the emotionally compelling leadership traits that prompt soldiers to follow a commander through a harrowing of hell. Her proven courage and brilliance combine with her unapologetic womanliness to demonstrate a kind of magnetism and power that has remained relatively unknown in the adamantly patriarchal United States. But in truth it is ageless – witness the examples of Maeve in Celtic mythology and Boudicca in classical history.

Not only do I cheer the senator-elect. Verily, I salute her as well.

Indeed there is a quality of trustworthiness about Warren the like of which I have not sensed in a politician since the halcyon days of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his brother Robert. That's why I believe she could become not just the new voice of a Democratic renaissance but the leader and conscience of an all-woman congressional insurgency that might actually free the party from its Wall Street captivity and restore the principles of the New Deal.

Admittedly that may be no more than the oft-disappointed yearning of a man who even in old age has never quite abandoned his conviction the Women's Movement would at last force this nation to be true to its stated principles of liberty and justice for all, much as my late father believed of the African-American Civil Rights Movement.

Though it may be a lot more than that. Ultimately it feels like another reliable prompting of journalistic intuition – the first real, instinctive, from-the-bottom-of-my-heart political hopefulness I have felt in years.

But on election night Warren's bright and blessed promise was ultimately meaningless – a phenomenon far away on the homeland coast from which I was long ago economically banished.

Here in real-time Tacoma the Anti-Transit-User Movement was proving the town and its surrounding Pierce County to be perfect examples of Moron Nation – my name for the USian worst, the most pridefully ignorant, venomously conformist, vindictively anti-intellectual, maliciously bigoted citizenry in the industrial world.

It was a realization all the more painful because I used to love Tacoma. There was a time, 34 years ago, when Tacoma was genuinely more cosmopolitan than Seattle, particularly in the welcome its people extended to “outlanders” like myself. But now the probable outcome of the transit fight was legitimately resurrecting the question once asked by a brazenly snooty Seattle tee shirt: “If God is on our side, why is there a Tacoma?”

Tacoma's vote is part of the Pierce County vote, and Pierce Countians were not only voting 51-49 to destroy the local transit system they had already ravaged at the polls in March 2011. Now in 2012 with Inslee headed for apparent victory, Pierce County was voting 52-48 for Rob McKenna, the homophobic, anti-health-reform, anti-Medicaid Republican attorney general who real Democrats feared was scheming to be another Scott Walker. And now, though marriage equality had won statewide, the locals were voting against it, 53-47 to withhold full citizenship from gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Because of Washington's absolutely reliable but painfully slow method of counting votes, the tabulations will continue for nearly another week.

If McKenna wins, Pierce County's closet-fascist voters can congratulate themselves. They will have made the difference between Washington remaining an officially progressive state or threatening – via gubernatorial powers of decree and paralysis-by-veto – to become another anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-gay Wisconsin. Likewise, had gay marriage lost, Pierce County could have lauded itself as the locale that swung the knockout punch of religious fanaticism against the LGBT community's yearnings for equality.

As a Tacoma-born colleague of mine pointed out in the context of a gay-bashing incident several years ago, what else can you expect from the town that has more churches and church-going zealots than any other municipality in the state?

But Tacoma and Pierce County also have the largest per-capita labor union membership in the state, which makes their citizens' calculated brutality toward transit-users all the more astonishing. It is a malevolence so intense the ballots have become like bullets – volleys to savage anyone who can't afford an automobile.

Once again, brandishing as they did in 2011 the Moron Nation shibboleth that “transit is welfare” (the corollary of which is “let's kill the bums by shutting down their transportation”), the Anti-Transit-User Movement was vetoing a last-ditch, save-our-system measure proposed by the agency that operates the local bus service.

Pierce Transit, as it's called, had asked voters to choose between two alternatives.

One is a tiny, three-tenths-of-one-percent sales-tax increase – that's three pennies on a $10 purchase – a sum even a pauper could afford.

The other is a 53 percent cutback in bus service: no service on weekends; no service after seven p.m. on weekdays; service on the few surviving routes reduced mostly to one bus per hour – utter devastation dealt those of us who depend on public transport.

Because the vote counts continue, it's logical to wonder if there's any chance for a last-minute reversal in the results. I asked two well-positioned sources that very question. Neither answered.

In other words, the Anti-Transit-User Movement of Tacoma and Pierce County has almost certainly won again – not really a surprise since its voters have rejected every other such proposal, whether from Pierce Transit or its Seattle-based regional counterpart Sound Transit, at least as far back as the middle '90s.

Even if by some miracle we pro-transit people manage to eke out a winning margin, our enemies – and enemies is precisely what they are – already threaten a Florida-type recount fiasco that could delay the decision for weeks if not months. Clearly their hatred knows no limit; seemingly, neither do the bank accounts of their financiers.

Nor is this unusual. The entire Puget Sound region has a uniquely anti-transit history that dates to 1968, when Seattle's first effort to build a regional light-rail system was easily defeated by a breathtakingly nasty campaign built around the assertion, never publicly proclaimed but often whispered, that “we don' wanna be like 'Jew' York.” Impossible to trace, it was apparently spawned by a faction of the One Percent that regarded adequate mass transit as a threat to its hegemony – an invitation to “undesirables” who might challenge local sweatshops and question the exclusionary privileges that make much of Western Washington a private country club for the super-rich.

Three more decades of xenophobic no-transit votes reduced the population's smugly arrogant claims of environmental superiority to undeniable proof of a hypocrisy so huge its only counterpart in U.S. political history is the fossil-fuel industry's Big Lie efforts to persuade us it's not Mother Nature's deadliest adversary.

Only in recent years has a huge influx of high-tech “outlanders” nullified Seattle's indigenous hostility to public-transport users. Compared to transit systems in other Pacific Northwest coastal cities, Portland to the south and Vancouver in Canada, Seattle mass transit runs at least four decades behind – deliberately kept so backward it cannot possibly catch up – an urban-area outrage even in the notoriously autocentric United States.

Now, as if in a race toward a new bottom, the Anti-Transit-User Movement of Tacoma and Pierce County is bidding to make its own bailiwick many times worse. What nobody in authority wants to admit is that downsizing of the magnitude being inflicted by ATUM voters will almost certainly mean the death of Pierce Transit. Nearly a fifth of its operating revenues come from the fare box. A service reduction of 53 percent will slash fare-box income to the proverbial bone, most likely enough to bankrupt the agency and shut it down permanently.

One knowledgeable transport-industry source says Tacoma/Pierce County thus will have brought upon itself the odium of being the largest urban area in the industrial world without public transportation. Thus too will it become a monument to greed, bigotry and miserliness, a nadir of anti-transit-user malice. Endorsed as the ATUM is by the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce and a deep-pocket coalition of local automobile dealers, it is already attracting the most negative sorts of international attention.

Clearly, its alliance with the rabidly Teabaggerish ATUM severely limits the chamber's ability to fulfill one of its primary responsibilities – promoting Tacoma/Pierce County as a forward-looking place in which to headquarter, expand or build business and industry.

Presumably the chamber represents all local business interests, but its emergence as a leader in the war against mass transit users suggests a much narrower (hidden) agenda. Has the chamber deliberately made itself an instrument in the One Percent's lethal subjugation of lower-income people? Is there some secret cabal of obscenely wealthy speculators eagerly awaiting the last run of the last Pierce Transit bus? Do they intend – once the transit agency is slain – to launch a for-profit bus company?

No doubt such service would be priced to exclude all save the richest commuters – the aggressively Caucasian autocentrics who loudly decry the area's ever-more-gridlocked highways even as their votes against transit make the traffic that much worse.

Why then do they vote as they do?

Only a boundless aversion to the implicit democracy of public transport – a bottomless loathing and contempt for racial and ethnic minorities and the urban poor in general – could prompt such self-contradictory voting. With Pierce Transit slain and a for-profit bus company operating on the commuter routes, the wealthy suburbanites – and let us not forget Tacoma's growing number of penthouse urbanites – would finally have their own de facto limousine service.

Plausible? You be the judge. But as we all know, privatization is almost always the ugly motive behind the deliberate downsizing and destruction of government services.

Perhaps some securely employed investigative reporter – if indeed any remain – will wrangle an assignment to explore these questions in depth.

Meanwhile there's no doubt the attack on Tacoma/Pierce County bus riders is class war of the most vicious sort. Those of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished and therefore dependent on public transport for medical appointments, grocery shopping and other life-sustaining errands are being handed the Ayn Rand version of a termination notice: "we don't want you here; hurry up and die."

LB/7-8 November 2012

-30-

(Note: given the outcome of Tuesday's election, I consider it a blessing I am terminally ill, according to my cardiologist doomed by post-Covid complications of heart and kidney failure to die before next September -- this despite the fact I was fully inoculated.  Though the I Ching, Runemal  and  the Marseille  Tarot all predicted in January 2020 the pandemic would kill me, I began to believe by 2023 I had misread these ancient  oracles,  which for me have always been uncannily accurate.  But in June and July of that year I was felled by Covid, abed 10 days with scorching fever and 12 days more for recovery, then learned it had fried my heart and irreparably damaged my kidneys. Thus I will most likely escape the horrors of Trump's promised New American Holocaust.)

*****

As I was allowed to suggest via a New York Times comment thread this morning (8 November 2024), 'I think if we want a truly accurate picture of our domestic future -- financial, political, sociological -- we need look at the Pinochet Regime in Chile. (I say this not only because Elon Musk's pledge of "economic hardship" echoes the neoliberal "shock treatment" Pinochet imposed on Chile, but because of the incoming regime's promises of ideological transformation and vengeance.)'  (Links added for DfD readers.) Needless to say, this puts a powerful imprimatur on the following analysis.  

*****

WHILE THIS REPORT'S  headline may strike some readers as a bit over the top, it will do so only because so much of the capitalists' Mainstream Media Machine, the world's first privately owned, for-profit re-creation of Josef Goebbels' Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda), has already been intimidated into radically downplaying the ecogenocidal counter-revolution President-Elect Donald Trump has promised his violently hateful, lynch-mob-minded legions of supplicants  and storm-troopers.  In terrible truth, the campaign oratory of Trump, his Vice-President-Elect JD Vance and their fanatical henchmen justifies every word within this rightfully terrifying text. That's why it's so copiously footnoted by links.  Trump's republic-killing pledges, including his promise to sic the military on "enemies within" -- presumably anyone who dares even the slightest criticism of his policies and edicts -- is documented here. Other campaign promises are detailed here and here. Even without the unabashed Christonazification proposed by Project 2025,  the implications of these promises rationally evoke unprecedented anxiety.

Try as I might, I cannot banish my fear that Trump is the end, forever, not only of the American experiment in democracy, but of any realistic hope for saving our species from extinction or preserving our Mother Earth from permanent reduction to Precambrian lifelessness.

To The New York Times editors' attempt to reassure the world all is well because "the long-term fate of American democracy...remains in the hands of the American people,"¹  I can only reply  it was those very hands that have imposed the apocalyptic cancer of Trump on the nation and the world, not once but twice. These editors, normally far more usefully insightful, have somehow chosen to echo the misguided optimists who maintained the Germans had surely tasted sufficient democracy in the Weimar Republic to prompt them to eventually oust Hitler.  But the Original Nazism proved so compelling that stopping its reign of unspeakable atrocities would never have been accomplished without the indescribable heroism of the Red Army. As Ernest Hemingway is alleged to have said: "Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid.”² The Soviet Union's  monumental sacrifice -- a death-toll present research is pushing toward 40 million --  is as vital a lesson in the requirements of humanitarian survival as any in our species' approximately 300-million years of experience. Yet now it is obvious the U.S. electorate has either tragically forgotten its message or -- more likely in the case of the Trumpite zealots -- rejected its validity.  The defiant re-election of Trump despite his inflammatory bigotry,  multiple felony convictions and relentlessly repeated vows of ecogenocidal tyranny prove today's Christonazism is no less seductively binding -- and blinding -- than Hitler's original. But this time there is no Red Army to rescue us from the resultant horrors.

Seemingly as much in denial as the Times honchos, Kamala Harris likewise seeks to reassure us, telling us "it's going to be ok." She tries to soothe us as if we were injured children fearfully awaiting medical intervention.  Never mind the overwhelming  evidence "ok" is the very quality Trump will steal from the collective future of the entire 99.9 Percent and violently rip from the individual futures of any of us who dare rise up to oppose him; Kamala says "it's going to be ok."    Never mind his co-conspirators' plans to outlaw unions,  rob women of their right to vote and repeal or diminish every other progressive  achievement that has defined  our 248-year history; Kamala assures us "it's going to be ok." And never mind an entire  universe of rival critics -- fiercely unapologetic Marxians and conciliatory united-front communists and democratic socialists and conventional progressives and radical pacifists -- all agree it was the Democrats' craven submission to the demands of  their capitalist puppet-masters  that passed the termination switch back to Trump and returned the doomsday keys to the Christonazi fanatics;  Kamala insists "the light of America's promise will always burn bright...it's going to be ok." Such is the Democratic (sic) Party's  post-election strategy.

Are we then so gullible  we'll continue believing  what we are repeatedly told, that Trump's terrifying triumph is merely the unfortunate result of the Democrats' mistaken judgement, that we are suffering nothing more than the temporary consequences of a series of well-intentioned strategic and tactical errors? Don't we comprehend what is being done to us? Can't  we sense the nation-wrecking malice in Biden's extended refusal to   resign his candidacy?  Why aren't we outraged by the infinite contemptuousness  so blatantly evident in the Democrats' carefully scripted effort to conceal the apparent feeble-mindedness that now --  with Josef Goebbels cunning -- does double duty to excuse the president's unprecedented malfeasance?  Why do we ignore  the overwhelming evidence the slaying of our 248-year-old republic is the  intended outcome of a predatory, multi-generation plutocratic operations plan that dates back to the 1930s and the scheme hatched by Hitler, Mussolini and our  capitalist overlords to enslave us all by nazification? Are we too numbed by trauma to recognize  the Trumpite triumph as tantamount to invasion and conquest?  Are we already too sickened  by neoliberalism's metastasizing moral imbecility to resurrect  the  empathy that fosters solidarity? Have we thus become too self-indulgent to embrace the discipline that forges solidarity into effectiveness? Are we too intimidated to organize sustained resistance? Are we indeed the permanently subjugated  rabble our predatory masters believe us to be? Have we truly surrendered to enslavement? Have we forgotten we're  the working class, the 99.9 Percent without whom human society can neither function nor survive? Will we ever  dare  rise up again to take back what is rightfully ours?

*****

(Note: the following is a substantially improved version of the comment I posted on the  World Socialist Web Site immediately after Trump's victory became overwhelmingly obvious.)

WHILE I AM not at all surprised by the Christonazi triumph, I am both surprised and terrified by the approval of a new American Holocaust implicit in the fact Trump is gaining reelection not just by Electoral College fiat but by winning the popular vote as well.

I can no longer doubt what I've hypothesized for several weeks on several comment threads, those of  NYT and the World Socialist Web Site included, that  the Biden/Harris candidacy was never more than the Democratic (sic) Party's most plausibly deniable way to throw the election to Trump, thereby fulfilling the Democrats' historically proven post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the Republican (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party and simultaneously completing the bipartisan, slow-motion nazification process tacitly approved by the Congressional grant of de facto immunity to the Bankers' Plot perpe-traitors in 1934. I hardly need say both are essential aspects of the capitalists’ scheme to expand and perpetuate what today we know as neoliberal tyranny.³

My hypothesis will be confirmed if Trump rewards Biden and Harris by exempting them from the mass arrests by which he promises to punish all his opponents. (Perhaps he will also exempt Obama, whom I long ago dubbed Barack the Betrayer, and whom I have long suspected the Democrats put in the White House for the clandestine, plausibly deniable purpose of resurrecting the fanatical racism that brought us to the present denouement.)

As to the toxic magnitude of that racism, and as to how Trump is winning the popular vote even in states where substantial majorities are approving pro-abortion measures, I believe the answer is implicit in the Pew-Poll data that shows 77 percent of the white adult citizenry⁴ in denial of the genocidal racism that was so overwhelmingly  obvious in Bush II's response to Katrina. I take this data as an accurate measurement of U.S. white-supremacist sentiment.  Thus there is a theoretical 77-percent majority of white women who are both pro-choice and enough vengefully racist to vote for a convicted felon who is also an admitted disciple of Adolf Hitler. The election results indicate they are voting away their bodily autonomy to enable Trump’s promised restoration of official white supremacy and simultaneously voting to regain and perpetuate their bodily autonomy via their home states' restorations of abortion rights. Obviously they fail to understand all Trump need do to impose a national abortion ban is yield -- as is his obvious intent -- to the  Christonazi demand to reactivate the Comstock Act,  which could easily be expanded into a national ban on all forms of contraception. It's former use as a weapon against the LGBTQ community -- which Trump considers part of "the enemy within" -- could also be resurrected.  And with Christonazi control of the Senate, there is no longer any possibility Comstock can be repealed. 

Significantly, regardless of the odds against its passage, the most recent Comstock-repeal effort was quietly sandbagged by the Biden/Harris Administration -- yet another proof of the Democrats'  clandestine function as the Christonazi Fifth Column, which I cite here as a lesser example of the penchant for treachery necessary to throw an election.   

And now -- 8 November 2024 -- it appears only a miracle can stop the Trump and his Christonazis from taking the House as well. This final viuctory -- terminal in every sense -- would not only give them absolute control of the federal government; it would end forever any hope the 20 remaining so-called blue states might be allowed to maintain sanctuaries that sustain women's autonomy and preserve the lives of those of us Trump and his lynch-mob followers target for deportation or extermination. Trump has already told us  he'll impose martial law to subjugate any cities or states that dare resist. To avoid demoralizing the national military by employing it for the mass  murder of fellow Americans, Trump will almost certainly order the long-term occupations policed by one or more of his his militia organizations, much as Hitler did with his infamous Death's Head SS.  These extended intrusions will undoubtedly replicate the horrors of unrestrained genocide that characterized the German presence in Poland, the western Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Because the populations of most of the blue states are to varying extents  forcibly disarmed and often denied the ability to learn and practice marksmanship, they will never be able to organize effective partisan resistance of the sort that was mounted by the Russians, Poles and Yugoslavs. Nor is civil war possible.  Federalization of blue-state national guard units to round up immigrants, arrest dissenters and suppress protest demonstrations would place them under defense department command, subjecting all officers and enlisted personnel  to the Uniform Code of Military Justice,  with death-penalty offenses including mutiny and sedition. The defection of a guard unit to defend a state against federal invasion is not only outlawed by the UCMJ but prohibited by the surveillance that  inescapably monitors us all. The blue-state secession about which so many progressives have fantasized is thus also rendered impossible.  And it seems there is no hope whatsoever for aid from outside the country. Research indicates the U.S. is so feared and despised, no nation on earth  would be willing to provide the assistance necessary to restore its peoples' freedom  -- that even the remaining communist nations would rather see the U.S. destroyed than resurrected as a Marxian ally.

We have been voted  into the abyss; the apocalypse -- whether by world war, environmental rape or both -- is upon us all.  

Confronted as we shall soon be by a violently hostile domestic regime rendered technologically omnipotent by unimaginably advanced weaponry, forever robbed of our privacy by total surveillance, threatened by the regime's promise to criminalize even the most superficial expressions of opposition and severely fragmented by identity-politics divisiveness,  the only possible way we might yet preserve our humanity -- and perhaps also eventually arise to help save our species and preserve our Mother Earth -- is by defiantly building the solidarity necessary to collectively embrace Leon Trotsky's ideologically disciplined, no-compromise brand of world-wide socialist activism.

Let us read, re-read and commit to memory the solidarity-building lesson of John Paul Sartre's "Republic of Silence" -- that he and his comrades

...were never more free than during the German occupation...The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence that is known as the lot of man. Exile, captivity, and especially death (which we usually shrink from facing at all in happier times) became for us the habitual objects of our concern. We learned that they were neither inevitable accidents, nor even constant and exterior dangers, but that they must be considered as our lot itself, our destiny, the profound source of our reality as humans...

Let us not forget Comrade Trotsky's cautionary adage that "in every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana."

Let us nevertheless wholeheartedly organize our minds and bodies  for maximum resistance.

This time around, we have nothing to lose but our  hopelessness.

______________
¹America Makes a Perilous Choice," The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2024. (Linked here but not above because non-subscribers may be unable to access it without emailed invitations from subscribers .) 
²Though I cannot find an authoritative source for this quote -- hence  "alleged" -- I have heard it repeated since my teens and know enough about Hemingway (a distant maternal cousin) to find the attribution entirely credible, particularly as something he might have said as a war correspondent  covering  (and clandestinely participating in) World War II. 
³I long ago began correctly describing neoliberalism as "socioeconomic nazism" because I recognized its intent to use genocide by austerity (rather than by  death camps) to create an übermenschen of the Hitler/Ayn-Rand breed and eventually transform all humanity into a master race capable of achieving whatever it might imagine. See Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism  (George Monbiot & Peter Hutchinson, Crown: 2024), especially pgs. 16-24 and 155-158. 
⁴CORRECTION: I somehow misremembered this number as "73 percent." Shame on me; I should have checked it.

LB/6-9 November 2024

"...Far and away the road goes winding..."

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Father Bix passionately addressing an outdoor rally for a $15 Tacoma minimum wage in 2014, the summer before he died. This was among the very last of my film photographs; (Leica M4, 90mm Elmar, Tri-X at 800 ASA in D-76). The upper three of the four images below exemplify  the ecogenocidal militarism and poverty Bix courageously opposed despite decades of relentless persecution;  the fourth image symbolizes the peace and justice activism to which he so fearlessly dedicated his life. TOP: the beginning of  the 1967 Memorial Day police riot in New York City's Tompkins Square Park; (VT Canon, 35mm Leica screw-mount Summicron, Tri-X at ASA 1000 in Diafine). SECOND:   the Memorial Day outrage began with a typical, unnecessarily  brutal  arrest of a non-violent protestor. Evidence ferreted out years later suggests this  atrocity -- triggered as it was by a deluge of anti-musician complaints from the large community of Ukrainian Nazi war criminals given official U.S. sanctuary on Manhattan's Lower East Side -- was among the first overt actions of the Central Intelligence Agency's  Operation CHAOS, its death-dealing war against the Counterculture. The agency viewed the Counterculture's increasingly anti-patriarchal artists and activists as  prime targets, not the least because some of them were deliberately resurrecting the Great Goddess -- our species' original,  longest-acknowledged, incalculably ancient deity --  as an ultimate  symbol of modern revolution; (Pentax H1A, Spiratone 135mm f2.8; Tri-X at ASA 1000 in Diafine).  THIRD: homeless in Tacoma, 2015; (Canon EOS-T7, 18mm-55mm Canon zoom,  desaturated ASA 400 Kodacolor). LAST: after a violently jeered demonstration in Bellingham, 1971; (Nikon F, 105mm f2.5 , Tri-X in D-76 at 800 ASA).   All photos by Loren Bliss © various years,  © renewed  2024. For more historically relevant photojournalism, scroll down to the portfolios on the left sidebar.)   

 

 

 

THE BACK STORY on the "Greatest Teacher of Nonviolence" dialogue:  Reading Mr. Wong's moving tribute to the late Rev. James Lawson as it was reprinted by Popular Resistance on 7 July 2024, I was moved to write, on the reprint’s comment thread, the following tribute to another nationally known dead pacifist, Tacoma's Fr. William J. Bischel SJ. Thus evolved the subsequent dialogue and my confession of ideological nonconformity, relevant parts of which are republished here, albeit edited for improved accessibility and expanded as promised, its unprecedented frankness no doubt prompted by  the fact that – despite having received all available Moderna inoculations against Covid – I am terminally ill with Covid-inflicted complications, warned last September by my cardiologist I won't live beyond September 2028. I was no doubt equally motivated by the (unrelated) fact I -- the "man crippled by political corruption" -- had just been released from hospitalization for the only truly paralyzing agony I’ve ever suffered in all my 84 years, the legacy of my afternoon encounter on 23 September 1978 with a middle-aged, alcohol-fueled vehicular crime-wave named Charles John Hoover, one of Washington state's many defiantly habitual drunken drivers obscenely empowered by that era's  state and local politicians, prosecutors and judges,   with more of the incident's infuriating details reiterated in this post's penultimate paragraphs.

*** 

MY INITIAL COMMENT (herein edited for clarity): While we are properly honoring the very few clergy who courageously defy Christianity's historically proven patriarchal hatefulness, let us be sure to thank them for their brave rebuttals of the ecogenocidal misogyny the Christians' infinitely sadistic deity mandates via the biblical Genesis, and which Jesus perpetuates by boastfully murdering a fig tree (Mark 11:12-25) and declaring eternal war against and between all humans (Matthew 10: 34-36). And let us never forget the Tacoma Jesuit who was viciously persecuted and often jailed¹ by our clandestinely theocratic, hence definitively ecogenocidal federal government. (For the identity of the neo-Reichsführers who increasingly enforce the government's orthodoxy,  see The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and subsequent works by Jeff Sharlet).²   About Fr. Bischel, I met him in 1978; admired him immediately; consulted him often in my coverage of Tacoma for United Press International c. 1978-1982; then  happily reconnected with him in Occupy Tacoma and  the city-council-betrayed fight for a minimum-wage increase led by Tacoma 15 Now.³  Nor do I feel serving avowedly nonviolent organizations in any way compromises my  oft-acknowledged admiration for Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Budyonny and Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Indeed I regard nonviolence as the preferable, non-escalating first response to most atrocities. 

If there is such a thing as Heaven, the man we activists fondly knew as Father Bix is already sainted therein, papal reticence not withstanding; and if there is truly reincarnation, Goddess grant he be reborn in realms of better times and genuine freedom. 

(By the way, I have an amusing story about Father Bix and me working together in Occupy, which I will tell as accompaniment to this comment in my next post on Dispatches from Dystopia [via TypePad] and on Outside Agitator's Notebook [same text via Blogger].) 

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Comment by Red Hornet:  I can't help but admire you and all the freedom efforts you have been part of. But I'm skeptical of memorials and testimonials set before an audience with little interest in history and minuscule interest in activist history. I think this site (Popular Resistance) and most others have abandoned their educational mission in order to lure clicks.

***

My Reply to Red Hornet (also edited herein for clarity)...I wonder if you're familiar with the writing of H. L. Mencken, a decidedly politically incorrect Baltimore Sun journalist made famous by his caustic coverage of the theocratic spasm he labeled "the Scopes Monkey Trial."  Mencken defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." He denounced Arkansas as "the apex of moronia" in another kindred squabble  and was already damned as an elitist for an earlier editorial comment that has since been proven genuinely prophetic: "On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." Hence "the Moronic Majority," my deliberate play on Nixon's "Moral Majority," as is much less obviously my repeated use of "Moron Nation" to describe the Disunited States.

Though I remain Marxian at heart -- indeed it is my unshakeable conviction the apocalyptic consequences  of the slaying of the Soviet Union will prove to be not only the doom of all humanity but the reduction of our Mother Earth back to the bug planet she was 400 million years ago -- my faith in the U.S. working class was bludgeoned to death by the lynch-mob of construction-workers who viciously attacked post-Kent-State-Massacre peace demonstrators at New York's city hall on 8 May 1970.

Since then -- witnessing the  gleefully sadistic participation of the USian working class in the methodical reversal of literally every progressive advancement the U.S. ever achieved -- I am appalled beyond words by the extent to which the self-obsessed moral imbecility pimped by Ayn Rand has become this nation's core ethos. Though no recognized critic dares say it, what Rand actually did was fictionalize the Nazis' übermenschen ethos. The ruling class then made her tomes of  Mein Kampf values required reading for the nation's teens, who were already so theocratically oppressed, our masters correctly assumed they'd desperately seize any (apparent)  ideology of rebellion. The (intended) result legitimized both the run-amok egotism that destroyed Occupy from within and  the self-righteously ecogenocidal Christonazi misogyny, homophobia and racism that motivated the government violence against Occupy and will soon finish fulfilling Mencken's dire prophecy by electing Trump to turn this nation into the de facto Fourth Reich.

No doubt my militantly Loyalist ancestors -- deported to their ancestral realms in the British Empire by the U.S. founders' decrees in 1789 -- had reached analogous conclusions about the so-called "patriots," a "rabble-in-arms" that no doubt included the direct descendants of those who in the 1640s despised a uniquely successful Connecticut farmer named Mary Blisse (see correction below) so much, they twice persecuted her as a witch --  accusations that, Goddess be thanked, she managed to beat in court. In other words, I believe your dismal diagnosis is absolutely correct -- that writing anything sensible online is (mostly) casting pearls before swine. Though when it reaches persons as mindful as yourself, the effort is most surely redeemed, for which my deepest thanks.

***

CORRECTION: the Bliss ancestor accused of witchcraft was Mary Bliss  (spelled "Blisse" in the 19th Century genealogy), for whom many more details are available on Google; Mary was one of Margaret's daughters. The mistake is entirely my fault; I was confused by the genealogy's archaic sentence-structure and discovered my error only by research tonight, 10 July 2024, hence my apology to all.

***

And Here's the Promised Funny Story: During Occupy Tacoma's first after-dark outdoor mass meeting  -- a so-called General Assembly on a cold, sporadically drizzly  early-November night (sorry my original notes with the exact date were destroyed by the 2019 computer failure) -- the several hundred participants began an obviously supportive discussion about the need for nonviolence and more specifically for training in its strategy, tactics and methodology. Because I was already recognized as a contributing but avowedly Marxian elder, several of the folks in my immediate vicinity thus seemed a bit surprised when I noted we had a best-in-the-nation advocate of non-violence --which is always my strategic and tactical preference -- in the person of a local Jesuit, William Bischel of St. Leo Parish, whom I further identified as a fellow alumnus of the infamous Knox County, Tennessee jail.  But their surprise turned to chuckles  when a voice from behind me laughingly said, " I gotta thank Loren; he's my advance man." I turned, and there, maybe three persons deep in the crowd behind me, stood Father Bix himself, whom I had not seen in person since 1982. As I said to him at the time, "I shoulda known you'd already be here." 

*****

Added text:  The details of Mary Blisse's many astounding successes and her vengefully envious persecution by a typically hateful Christian neighbor and her ever-more-hostile husband (an abusive male-supremacist whose name surely seems to be a cosmic pun), are available here. I assume her agricultural success was due to heeding the allegedly "Satanic" advice of local First Nations folk. I likewise assume her own survival of 11 pregnancies, two  of then with twins, and the more indicative  survival at least into early childhood of all her children -- each phenomenon among the era's most astounding  statistical improbabilities -- strongly suggest she had somehow preserved much of the ancient, pre-patriarchal wisdom Christianity sought to destroy by its wars of extermination against witches, who were our originally matriarchal species' teachers, arbitrators, midwifes, healers and priestesses. Karen Vorbeck Williams wove the factual information about Mary Blisse into a 2016 novel, My Enemy's Tears: the Witch of Northhampton.  (Yes I will order it and read it ASAP, then if I am still alive, post a commentary on it here.)     Apropos the "loving" Christians'  continuation of such ecogenocidal intent into the present, note also their reader-board slogans during the late  1960s and early '70 --"Organic Is Satanic"; "Environmental Is Of The Devil"; and the more ubiquitous "God Hates Hippies." Obviously, the Christonazis' ever-escalating wars to expand prison slavery and revoke all female rights are merely resumptions of Christianity's historically proven intentions.  

Moreover -- as I can personally attest -- there is also the fact many  of Mary Blisse's present-day descendants (self and late father included), are unquestionably fey,  which implicitly adds that eerie quality to the list of Mary Blisse's characteristics her patriarchal assailants would have regarded as "Satanic." (Despite my family's definitively English name, we are genetically mostly Celt.) 

***

Added text: The irrefutable proofs of Christianity's incurable malignancy -- its murderous European, Middle Eastern, Asian, Sub-Saharan, African and American "crusades" against alleged "heretics" or non-Christian and First Nations peoples; the Burning Times; and of course the Original Nazis' Holocaust – are all expressions of  the Abrahamic god's mandate to continue and expand his ecogenocidal agenda. And the standard Christian claim  the New Testament reverses that doctrinal obligation is proven to be an especially egregious Big Lie by the   moral imbecility Jesus models in the  scriptures, that is  -- to say again -- by his maliciously boastful destruction of a fig tree (Mark 11:12-25) and by his declaration of eternal war against and between all humans (Matthew 10: 34-36).

Thus it cannot be said too often the gospels are mandates for ecogenocide. Church history reveals any contradictory claims of “divine love” or advocacy for mercy  are all murderous deceptions. The duration of this serial-killer mentality dooms us to repeatedly suffer ambush by frenzies of fundamentalist fanaticism and/or prosperity-gospel zealotry,  in response to which, many of us are at long last awakening to what the Soviet Union always recognized (and what makes Marxism so "Better-Dead-Than-Red odious to Christianity): the fact such malignancy cannot be reversed save by total ejection of the Bible and all its doctrinal extensions.

What then, absent Soviet influence, might we do? However unlikely it remains, global embrace of the ever-more-credible Gaia Hypothesis could surely save us; in essence, this is the scientific rediscovery of the lost and forbidden wisdom that, beginning some 6,000 years ago, has been (and is again) violently suppressed by the patriarchal onslaught. One of Gaia's most important but unfortunately less recognized implications is that every atom of every extant substance  -- whether past, present or future -- contains an undetected quotient of inertial momentum thrusting it toward consciousness; that we who are literally the evolved substance of the stars could not exist were this not so.  Gaia  is thus probably our only means of escaping extinction and halting patriarchy's deliberate reduction of our Mother Earth to a bug planet. Combined with international socialism, it would give us a truly sustainable, comfortably livable world.  I doubt any lesser solidarity can save us from the apocalypse of thermonuclear war and/or self-induced terminal climate-change our patriarchal Masters – whomever or whatever they might be – are working overtime to  make inevitable.
__________________

¹Popular Resistance does not allow inclusion of links to outside source material, so I've added them wherever they seemed essential for clarity.  

²Related books that document Christianity's ecogenocidal history include American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America, by Chris Hedges (Free Press: 2007);  An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Beacon Press: 2014); and  Hitler's American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, by James Q. Whitman (Princeton University Press: 2017). Only the need for brevity kept me from  citing these works in my original comment. 

³The Tacoma City Council, a reliable  puppet of the  plutocracy and thus active on several fronts to forcibly gentrify the city, defeated the Tacoma 15 Now minimum-wage campaign by  employing an especially nasty  variant of the "change-we-can-believe-in" treachery for which the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party is deservedly infamous. The council put on the ballot its own competitive initiative for a significantly smaller wage increase, then designed the ballot to impose maximum confusion and utilized a tsunami of brazen  deceit and whispered bigotry to mobilize the city's Moronic Majority to resoundingly defeat the proposed $15 minimum, which would have been effective immediately. Instead, winning measure (gradually) raises wages to a $12.50 minimum and -- contrary to 15 Now's absurd claims of ideological victory -- has thus kept the issue off the ballot ever since. The loss of the $15 minimum wage was truly cataclysmic, with 23,536 votes against it and only a mere 9,437 votes for, a devastating 71.38-percent to 28.62 percent debacle. Apropos the nature of local electorate, my analyses  here and  here of its bigoted opposition to adequate public transport also explain the overwhelming vote against the $15 minimum wage.

*********

Three Comments from The New York Times'  (meticulously censored) threads, their surprising approval for publication  spawning my hope at least one of its editorial executives shares my hypothesis: 

"Democrats Are Drifting Toward the Worst Possible of All Worlds"

 "‘God Help Us’: 12 Writers Rate Biden’s Performance at the First Presidential Debate"

President Biden's worse-than-abysmal performance in last night’s debate is merely additional proof of what I've been hypothesizing for the past several months: that the Biden candidacy is merely the Democrats' most plausibly deniable way of throwing the election to Trump -- whom the Democratic Party's corporate donors vastly prefer over Sen. Bernie Sanders or any other New-Deal progressive who might win the party's presidential nomination should Biden withdraw. (13 recommends).

***

"‘Is It Too Late?’ Four Writers on What Democrats Should Do About Biden"

As I said on an earlier NYT post-debate comment-thread, I strongly suspect (as I've been hypothesizing for several months), the Biden candidacy is the Democrats' most plausibly deniable way of throwing the election to Trump -- whom some of the party's corporate donors vastly prefer over Vice-President Harris or anyone else who might win the Democratic presidential nomination were Biden to withdraw. 

*********

My World Socialist Web Site comment-thread dialogue on "Supreme Court declares America a presidential dictatorship" is far too long to republish here in its entirety. It begins with our national obituary:

(14 July 2024: Sorry I forgot to include the link on this. My bad; was still zombified on hospital pain meds.)

In embittering and infinitely depressing truth, this is the end, forever, of any lingering elements of the charade USian democratic process became on 22 November 1963.

I'm not the least surprised,, as what we are witnessing here is how the '"Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party is masterfully employing Hitler's pack-the-judiciary strategy to complete the nazification of USia. As I have repeatedly predicted, Trump will never be punished for any of his crimes, past or future.

What no commentator has yet dared point out is that this Supreme Court decision literally makes presidential elections moot, as the dictatorial powers the president has been given combined with the financial aristocracy's control of the nominating process means the (so-called) electorate has no more control over the process than the Roman plebeians had over who was emperor.

Indeed, with the U.S. constitution now entirely in the Dumpster of history, I would assume Congress -- with the court's cooperation -- will soon abolish presidential elections and reserve the choice of presidents for itself.

Most readers of this website are probably too young to comprehend the long history of what just happened, so here's a quick summary. The nazification of the U.S. began with the Bankers Plot of 1933-34, which in all probability was the product of active collaboration between the financial aristocracy and Hitler. Congress gave it tacit approval in 1934 by refusing to prosecute the plotters, who with their descendants – no doubt with the assistance of the high-ranking Original Nazi war criminals they adopted as comrades-at-arms after Stalingrad proved the Third Reich could not win the war-- obviously continued plotting, albeit at a far-less-obvious boiled-frog pace. Subsequent milestones were the aristocracy’s capture of white Christianity beginning c. 1938; the adoption of war criminals beginning c. 1944; the purge of Communists, socialists and intellectuals beginning c. 1947; the destruction of organized labor by Taft-Hartley in 1948; the murder of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and the decade of political murders that followed; the initial imposition of so-called “neoliberal” (actually neonazi) economics begun in 1976 by Carter; the so-called Reagan Revolution of 1980; etc. ad nauseam.

Seems to me the only remaining question is whether Biden or someone younger will complete the “Democratic” (sic) Party’s post-JFK function as the nazifiers’ Fifth Column and finish what is obviously a plausible deniable scheme to ensure Trump’s emergence as the first USian Führer.

Not that it matters. This nation is done, conquered, subjugated, enslaved. And this time there is no Red Army to save us...or to save the world the Christonazi USian Reich is sure to destroy.

***

The most relevant part of this dialogue's concluding "Joint Reply"-- all four parts of it responses to antagonistic rejoinders prompted by the above post -- is the following:

To Leon: My motivation for activism begin when I was seven and my father was sacked in late 1947 as retaliation for his 1930s Communism, this by the War Assets Administration, formerly the War Production Board; his last WAA job was equivalent to what today would be a deputy regional directorship. Due the purge and its the associated blacklisting, we were permanently reduced from what might be termed "a new Lincoln family" to "a used Plymouth family." The date of his ouster marks the true, pre-McCarthy beginning of the (total) U.S. purge of Communists, socialists and all intellectuals save those of the pro-nazi right – never mind “pro-nazi intellectual” is an obvious oxymoron. My activism began at age 17 with advocacy of the Soviet approach to education in post-Sputnik debates organized by the Knox County, Tenn. school district c. 1957-‘58; these combined with my father's political history and my lesbian birthmother’s certified insanity after two attempts to murder my father and me c. 1944-‘45 to guarantee my loss of security clearance at the beginning of the last of my three years of active U.S. Regular Army duty. During my pre-military-period c. 1956 to late ‘59, I worked as a stringer for three dailies and two weeklies and as a motel night-clerk. My post-military activism c. late ‘62 through the early ‘90s¹ included the Civil Rights Movement plus the Anti-Vietnam-War; Alternative Press; Back-to-the-Land; Environmentalist; and Labor movements, the last category through memberships in the American Newspaper Guild, the National Writers Union and the National Press Photographers Association. I was also part of two NYC photographic collectives, Impact Visuals and Marc Crawford's TransMundo. More recently I was part of Tacoma Clinic Defense; was amongst the earliest activists in Occupy Tacoma; and served as a cadre member and a petition-signature gatherer for Tacoma 15 Now, from which I had to drop out due to  ever-increasing crippling imposed by a spinal injury radically inflamed by osteoarthritis.² Now hopelessly disabled by terminal post-Covid complications despite being current on all Moderna shots and boosters, I can no longer walk anywhere -- not even from one room to the next in my apartment -- without a walker, and my cardiologist told me last September these post-Covid complications will kill me within two years. Point being, your assumptions about me have no basis in fact.

My pessimism stems from realization during Occupy that Ayn Rand’s fictionalization of Mein Kampf’s self-obsessed moral imbecility – in which the younger generations of USian bourgeois whites are schooled literally from birth (never mind her writing is as wretched as Hitler’s) – is even more effective at nazification than the Better-Dead-Than-Red fear-mongering that co-opted feminism and environmentalism and otherwise seduced so many members of the Silent Generation and their Baby Boom successors.

When Occupy collapsed -- destroyed as much by zero-tolerance bourgeois self-obsession from within as by police-state violence from without -- I could no longer deny the validity of the leaked KGB analysis that damns most white USians as irremediably conditioned from birth to always betray genuine revolution. The analysts concluded the only USian populations possessed of the requisite pre-revolutionary consciousness are the most economically oppressed Blacks, Hispanics and First Nations peoples – which is why these groups are under constant surveillance and exterminated whenever they show signs of graduating to revolution – atrocities to which I as a near-lifelong journalist and activist can surely attest.³ Hence I’d urge you to remember history proves building revolution requires full acknowledgment of and evolution of countermeasures against all anti-revolutionary factors. That vital response now includes evolving an antidote to the infinite hopelessness (rationally) inflicted on us by USia’s methodical reversal of literally every progressive gain its peoples ever made.

___________________

¹These dates inadvertently misstate the years of my labor activism. My first Newspaper Guild membership was in 1956 and early 1957 at The Grand Rapids (Michigan) Herald.  My post-military union activism actually began with Taxi Weekly's tacit support of the successful Taxicab Drivers Organizing Committee (TDOC) campaign in New York City c. 1965-1967. I resumed actual Guild membership at The Jersey Journal, where I worked as an investigative reporter c. 1969-1970; I joined the National Press Photographers Association as the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun in the '70s, renewed it intermittently (depending on employment) after that,  and added membership in the National Writers Union as a freelancer probably in 2005. Over the years I have also served several unions as a volunteer picket, and I have never crossed a picket-line, nor will I ever do so. All this was  permanently ended by encroaching physical disability  late in the new century's second decade. My error -- its misstated chronology unintentional -- was the result of my too-hasty effort to summarize a complex history terminated by medical circumstances that, because they were permanently life-changing,  are profoundly unpleasant to remember. Nevertheless my sincere apology. 

²This too is an accidental misstatement. What necessitated my dropping-out was a kidney infection; what made my absence permanent was the worsening back problem. Again my apology.

³A 2013 blog post that describes the earliest (1963)  example of my overt victimization by Christonazi censorship and my retaliatory recovery by defiant reporting is linked above in the Popular Resistance material and again here for readers' convenience.

*********.

About that ruinous encounter with the defiantly habitual drunken driver... 

THREE DAYS OF ever-more-devastating lower-back spasms  sent me to Tacoma General Hospital on Wednesday (3 July 2024), desperately seeking relief from most intense pain I've ever suffered. It had become so debilitating, I literally could not speak a word; merely trying to talk triggered cramps of hitherto unimaginable agony. Thus I could only scream; I muted my uncontrollable shrieks as much as possible by biting down hard on a rolled towel, this.to minimize their emotional impact on passers-by. But by about 3 a.m. Wednesday, the spasms had become nearly constant, striking me with unprecedented fury any time I moved at all. This meant I was 100-percernt dependent on the topmost-level verbal skills of Valerie Friedline to document my circumstances, to whom I am thus forever grateful. Valerie is an always helpful neighbor who is also my volunteer copy editor on the monthly senior-housing-community newsletter of which I am the volunteer founding editor, writer, photographer and creative director. 

To elaborate on what I said in "The Back Story" -- pun intended -- my literally unspeakable pain and its trip to the hospital was the most recent consequence of my 1978 Autumnal Equinox victimization by Charles John Hoover, a petty criminal who ran amok as a judicially protected, defiantly habitual  drunken driver. The injuries he wantonly inflicted on me  defined  not only my 38th year but became one of the three events -- the others the destruction of all my most significant work by arson on 1 September 1983 and the fatal post-illness complications of Covid resulting from a three-week, seemingly moderate bout with the obviously weaponized virus a year ago -- that now define my life as nothing more than a race against a literal deadline -- now another pun -- to organize my photography and writing into accessible form and perhaps -- should circumstances grant me the time --to at last fulfill the Tacoma public library's longstanding invitation to record my oral history as a local photographer, writer and Marxian activist.   

(Though it is a bit of an aside,  I find it very interesting that, as I have previously reported elsewhere,  Runemal, the I Ching and the Tarot -- the same three oracles that correctly defined the fire as the end of my dependably productive and influential life -- unanimously predicted  Covid would kill me. Nevertheless,  until the ever-more-obviously lab-leaked bug nailed me last summer in a seemingly inexplicable localized outbreak that sickened 12 of my 40 apartment-complex neighbors without any of the dire consequences that are killing me, I'd begun to assume I'd somehow misunderstood the oracles' responses to the pandemic-motivated questions I asked in 2020.   And as I said above, my fatal complications have arisen despite  full [Moderna] vaccination. Thus -- though I am by no means an anti-vaxer -- I cannot but wonder if the vaccine is intentionally less effective than the documentably ecogenocidal   USian government assured us it would be.  Nor -- considering the multiple expressions of government hostility already known to have vindictively diminished my life -- is it beyond the realm of possibility I was somehow deliberately given fatally ineffective shots.)    

That said, what the drunken Charles John Hoover inflicted on me in '78 was a classic Godzilla-versus-Bambi debacle; with his speeding 442 Oldsmobile, he utterly destroyed my five-months-new 1977 Honda Civic, and he did so  without any obvious damage to himself, to the (abused) wife who was  his only passenger, or even to his own vehicle. The investigating officer told me had I been accompanied by a passenger, that person would have undoubtedly been killed, as the impact of Hoover's 3,713-pound curb-weight projectile drove me in my seat a fatally crushing distance  atop the Civic's right-side seat,  far enough across the console I could exit the smouldering wreckage only because I always carried a Swiss Army Knife -- already the most useful tool I owned -- in a belt pouch. This enabled me to reach the knife and again prove its usefulness by cutting myself free of my safety harness and thus escaping the ruined hulk in time to squelch the fire hazard of leaking-gasoline by yanking the grounding-cable off the battery. Having de-electrified the rubble,  I then snatched a motor-driven Nikon with a fully loaded magazine from a camera bag in the back seat, walked a 360 around the scene to photographically document the collision's immediate aftermath, carefully replaced the camera in the bag and passed out.

Though I have no recollection of doing so, I had somehow retained enough consciousness to ask the paramedics to fetch the photographic gear and retrieve my loaded .45 ACP M1911 Colt government model from the glove box.  When I regained full consciousness maybe an hour later on a gurney in the Tacoma General Hospital emergency room, my first words asked the whereabouts of these items, and I was delighted to learn everything -- including the canvas G.I. pouch containing the Colt's two spare loaded magazines --had been given to the triage nurse,  who  would return it all to me when I was released a few hours later.  The ER doctor said I had obviously been "running on pure adrenaline" in my immediate post-impact activities, that I had passed out because I had probably "forgotten to breathe," and that while X-rays proved I had no broken bones or internal bleeding, I would need a follow-up exam for probable spinal injuries, because I had "massive soft-tissue bruising" and would probably soon be immobilized enough to need an at-home care-giver for a few days, as indeed I did. Though I was able to get home in a cab,  the next day I could barely move; I missed a full week of work, during which I was mercifully cared for by Kathryn Habbestad, a friend and colleague from Seattle who was kind enough to take time away from her own  job and stay with me as a helpmate until I was again ambulatory. 

When I realized Hoover had no intention of contacting me for the legally required post-accident exchange of information,  I hired a lawyer, from whom I would soon learn my 4:30 p.m. victimization  resulted in Hoover's 19th -- yes, that's nineteenth -- consecutive drunken-driving arrest, and that by some miracle -- or, more likely, some quirk of local corruption -- he still had (minimal) liability insurance.  I also learned multiple witnesses said Hoover brandished a bulging roll of hundred-dollar bills with which he tried to bribe them into claiming I had pulled out onto Pearl Street in front of him. (I was actually trapped motionless in the Highland Hills Shopping Center exit onto Pearl, unable to move forward because of heavy Saturday afternoon traffic and prohibited from moving backward by the vehicles behind me, thus forced to watch motionless in horror as  north-bound Hoover skidded across the rain-slick street's four lanes, jumped the curb onto the concrete sidewalk, caromed in reversed direction off a concrete power-pole and careened southward toward me on the sidewalk perhaps 100 yards at what the police estimated was about 50 miles-per-hour to slam into the driver's side of my little Honda and destroy it with an impact energy of  approximately 310,054 (three-hundred-and-ten-thousand, fifty-four) foot pounds, this by the Newtonian formula of one-half the projectile's weight times its velocity squared,  E=1/2M(V²). For comparison, the identically calculated muzzle energy of the .50 caliber Browning M2 "Ma Deuce" machine gun round averages a mere 12,600 (twelve thousand, six hundred) foot pounds.

One of the same group of a half-dozen  witnesses said Hoover lost control of his gas-guzzler because he was beating his wife and trying to drive at the same time. Several witnesses said Hoover, who was scarcely more than five feet, four inches in height, called the notably taller investigating officer a "cunt," then attacked her with a flurry of  punches, which she quickly neutralized with a nightstick uppercut to Hoover's testicles. That dropped him. He went to jail in handcuffs, cursing all cops and vowing vengeance against me and the female officer who'd subdued him. He was charged with drunken driving, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, attempted bribery and other crimes I have since forgotten. Hoover's violent tantrum had brought several more cops to the scene, and another one of the officers told my lawyer Hoover had managed to delay the breathalyzer test long enough to bring his score down from what was "probably at least a .32" to what I remember was a .28 or thereabouts.  But a Tacoma District Court judge soon reduced his 19th drunken-driving  charge to "physical control" and dismissed all the other charges,  convicting him only of being in (alleged) control of a speeding  projectile  nearly twice the weight of a standard high-explosive 16-inch naval artillery round.

Since Hoover never once tried to contact me, I sued him, and of course I won; his sort of hatred of the world and all within it is unforgivable. But he was obviously a premeditated  drunken driver, for he had maliciously structured  his finances so all anyone could get was the maximum payout of his liability insurance, which as I recall was $15,000, a third of which went to the lawyer. Not that it matters; no amount of money would ever be adequate compensation for the pain and physical limitation with which Hoover cursed me  -- the latter including eventual 100=percent loss of my formerly unlimited ability to backpack deep into the wilderness for trout fishing and/or archaeological research.   And I cannot but wonder  how many more people this infinitely malicious moral imbecile injured with his judicially protected drunken driving before his death in 2006.

********

In closing this anthology of horrors, I respectfully offer the following five songs as a suggested liturgy for compensatory contemplation and meditation: "The Burning Times"; "The Ballad of Thomas Rhymer"; "Song to Brighid";  "Phantasmagoria in Two" and "Mother Earth Song."  Blessed be!

(Yeah, I know there's a lot to read here, especially with the links-as-footnotes. But it will be a long while before I'm able to post again.  So you'll have plenty of time to read it all -- and it is my hope you find it both thought-provoking and educational. Meanwhile, thank you for your readership.)

LB/12 July 2024. 

-30-

AS BEFORE, I am still at work on a (very) lengthy and emotionally difficult anthology of essays and photographs, this in preparation for my death, the approach of which is radically accelerated by severe post-Covid complications that have already reduced me to an invalid, and which -- since I was fully vaccinated -- strongly suggest at least some of the vaccines given us old folks were useless pacifiers, a probability most assuredly in keeping with the genocidal intent of  patriarchy and ever-more-nazified capitalism.  Assuming I live so long, when I am able, I will resume "normal" blogging (and yes, I trust the quotation-marks will excuse the malapropism).  Beyond that, for those who might be interested in speculative archaeology and anthropology, here  -- slightly modified -- is an excerpt from a note I sent to a fellow pagan just before the Summer Solstice:  

Apropos the probable original function of the Fool and the Tarot in general, what follows is an analysis in keeping with what -- if memory serves -- is one of Colin Wilson's hypotheses in his epic work The Occult -- specifically his supposition that many of the items used by present-day psychics originated anciently as practical tools the original functions of which are suppressed by patriarchal theocracy as "heretical" knowledge. (My apology for the lack of  a more precise bibliographical reference; my copy of Wilson's  book and several pages of associated notes were destroyed by the 1983 arson fire.) Nevertheless, if I remember Wilson's theory correctly, and if it does indeed apply to the Tarot deck, its present-day role as a popular tool of clarification and accurate prophecy may well have evolved from a Cargo-Cult-like folk-memory of its ancient use as a mathematically precise predictor of solar and lunar eclipses.   

The card known as the Empress signifies feminine power of such magnitude it resoundingly refutes the pseudo-scholarship that strives to associate the deck with the Hebrew alphabet, which would enhance its marketability by binding it to the ecogenocidal misogyny that defines the scriptural cores of the Abrahamic religions and is the doctrinal anchor that invariably -- and despite courageous efforts at reform -- drags Judaism, Christianity and Islam  back to modern repetitions of their murderous histories of patriarchal fanaticism.¹  Thus after a dream focused my mind on the riddle posed by Wilson's hypothesis, I began questioning how the Tarot might have originated  as a portable tool for answering two riddles posed by the breathtakingly ancient “Song of Amergin”:  

Who (but I) can tell the ages of the moon?
Who (but I) can tell the place where the sun rests?

That was in September 1972; the subsequent essay of maybe a dozen typewritten pages -- a relatively brief chapter in the arson-destroyed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” – focused on the abundant but then mostly ignored evidence indicating the Tarot is a carefully disguised relic of the age of the Goddess. Thus, like much of the traditional balladry rediscovered by the folk renaissance of the 1940s and ‘50s, the cards were a then mostly unrecognized but nevertheless still powerful invocation of her return. That chapter was  therefore part of the extensively footnoted material I cited in “Dancer,” which was a 150,000-word redefinition of the 1960s Counterculture as the first wave of the resurrection of the Goddess and the beginning of global revolution against patriarchy. Illustrated by about 100 photographs, "Dancer" was burned just it was on the brink of major publication. The fire also destroyed all my other significant work. Nevertheless, I remember enough of the Tarot piece to summarize it here, for whatever paths of contemplation it might suggest .

Because the Fool is the one unnumbered card in the 22-card Major Arcana, I took it as one of four marker-cards in what I believe was originally a late Neolithic or early Bronze Age pocket calculator a traveling priestess or priest might have used to keep track of the astronomical calculations done at Stonehenge. (Irish tradition dates “The Song of Amergin” to 1268 BCE²)  Eighteen of the remaining 21 cards through which the Fool journeys I took as representatives of an Ogham calendar-alphabet (rather than the Hebrew alphabet to which they were then typically assigned), and I sorted them into the appropriate 13 consonant/months and five vowel/seasons. (Alas, I no longer remember which cards I assigned to what months, and I do not have the spare time it originally took -- about a month of evenings and weekends --  to restore the destroyed work.)  I assigned the five obviously female cards – Priestess, Empress, Strength, Justice and Death – to the seasons; the fifth season of these ancient calendar-alphabets was the season of the new year, which added five days to the 360-day lunar year to make it approximately synchronous with the 365¼-day solar year.³    And I took the Star, Moon and Sun as additional markers, these to be used in conjunction with the Minor Arcana’s 56 cards because – thanks to research at Stonehenge – we had learned from its prehistoric builders that 56 is the lowest common denominator of eclipse cycles, and three the minimum required number of its movable indicators.⁴
__________________

¹Despite their propagandists' claims to the contrary, the history of Old Testament Judaism -- like histories of Christianity and Islam -- are defined primarily by expression of the misogyny and ecogenocide mandated by their core scriptures.  See for example  Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother, Harper San Francisco: 1987;  pgs. 230-234.

²Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (amended and enlarged edition):1966; pgs. 205-206.  

³Ibid., pg. 274 ff.

⁴Gerald S. Hawkins and John B. White, Stonehenge Decoded, Barnes and Nobel Books: 1993; pgs. 140-146. (My original source, part of the personal library destroyed by arson,  was the Doubleday edition published in 1968.) 

=========

Agitation Via Other Websites' Comment-Threads: 

Trump or Biden on Israel? I am daily more astonished so few of us see what history should have long ago made obvious to anyone with the proverbial lick-of-sense: that the Biden candidacy is merely the "Democratic" (sic) Party's most "plausibly deniable" way of throwing the election to Trump, thereby completing its post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

=========

Biden Should Blame Corporate Monopolies for Higher Prices. Love your anti-inflation video, Mr. Reich; it's a superbly explosive and properly saturating piece of work, puns obviously intended. But when oh when will you acknowledge the ever-more-excruciatingly obvious truth the Biden candidacy is the "Democratic" (sic) Party's "plausibly deniable" means of completing its post-JFK role as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party and throwing the election to Trump.

=========

Trump Will Not Accept Election Results. I salute Mr. Reich's courage and admire his persistence, but it is increasingly obvious Trump's victory -- and with it a new Holocaust -- is unavoidable.  Anyone with the proverbial lick-of-sense has already awakened to the terrifying truth there's no stopping  the  "Democratic" (sic) Party's "plausibly deniable" scheme to use the Biden candidacy to throw the election to Trump. .

Meanwhile, The New York Times'  latest disclosure of the Democrats' innumerable  treacheries reveals the obviously premeditated pro-Trump shenanigans of Biden's appointee at the Federal Election Commission. (Though most of the mainstream-media propaganda machine is suppressing this story, there are a couple of exceptions.  If you're not an NYT subscriber, google "federal election commission deregulation" without the quotation marks.)

Thus the Democrats move ever closer to fulfilling the final obligations of their  post-JFK, 100-percent-compromised function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

=========

California YIMBY Joins Corporate Landlords to Kill Rent Control. I had not known of the YIMBY movement until I read Mr. McDonald's report,  for which many thanks. But I have long been aware of the aggressive, self-obsessed, Ayn-Rand-spawned moral imbecility -- actually a variant of nazism (white supremacy and misogyny included) -- that seems to be the required ethos of high-tech professionals. I encountered it years ago, as a member of the working press, when the technofascists -- and that is precisely what they are -- began gleefully destroying newspaper editorial and mechanical departments with computerization.  I realized at the time they are all Josef-Goebbels-caliber liars, peddling their inventions as a great benefit to humanity when in fact their wholesale elimination of jobs proves them to be the most socioeconomically destructive force on the planet. I witnessed their vindictive self-obsession again in Occupy; though few in number, they functioned quite successfully as anti-solidarity agents, a Fifth Column that subverted us from within as we were being assaulted from without, and I could not but wonder if this was their clandestinely assigned role. Then a couple of years later came GamerGate, within which they shamelessly revealed their infinite malevolence. Thus YIMBY is no surprise. When combined with all the other evidence, it suggests the technofascists might be a new subspecies, genetically sociopathic, utterly devoid of empathy, and that the manifest cruelty of YIMBY is, like the boundless misery inflicted by their technology, the deliberate expression of their contempt and hatred for us all.

=========

TikTok Bans Video Demanding Bogdan Syrotiuk's Freedom. While I initially agreed with Comrade Zaremba apropos China's arguably pro-Russian, anti- UkraiNazi interest, on second thought I see the censorship of Tic-Tok as predictable for two reasons. It is (A), exemplary of the magnitude of China's concern over the looming (and obviously unstoppable) USian Empire ban of Tic-Tok. And it is therefore (B), irrefutable proof China's state capitalism is as neoloberal -- that is, as incipiently nazified -- as any other form of capitalism. In which context note also the unmistakable echoes of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

=========

Electric Trains Are the Powerhouse Electric Vehicles. Unfortunately we'll never get adequate national rail transport -- no matter how it is powered -- for the same reason USia ranks last in the developed world for local mass transit: the bottomless hatred of socioeconomic benefits that is unquestionably the deadliest venom of white-supremacist racism. (Doubt this? Google "racism vs. mass transit," without the quotation marks. And it isn't conjecture or refutable as "conspiracy theory"; it is long-proven, eternally unchanging fact.)

Indeed it is at least arguable we on the (real) left should be thanking Trump for revealing the extent to which The New York Times' breathtakingly courageous 1619 Project is unequivocal truth: that the infinite malice of race hatred is not only the definitive characteristic of U.S. history, but that it remains the sole unifying ethos of about 73 percent of the Caucasian population. It is an apocalyptic malignancy so uniquely potent in the U.S., that here -- unlike in any other nation -- race-hatred long ago replaced class-hatred as the core dynamic of socioeconomic strife.

(Additional educational references for those who still have their heads in the proverbial sand are, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law; James Q. Whitman, Princeton University Press: 2017; and An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Beacon Press: 2014.)

=========

And two from The New York Times:

New Report Underscores the Seriousness of Long Covid. Long Covid is literally killing me. Fully vaccinated, I was nevertheless felled by the virus a year ago. I will never again have any sense of taste or smell; it has intensified my osteoarthritis to the extent I am naught but a cripple; and it has worsened a hitherto-medication-stabilized atrial-valve deficiency of 10 percent to a deteriorating and therefore fatal failure last cardiogramed at 90 percent. Merely hobbling on my arthritis-mandated walker the 10 feet from my living room to my kitchen now leaves me breathless. An incurable fungus infection I brought back from extended military service in Korea c. 1961-1962 denies me valve-replacement surgery. My cardiologist told me last September that, thanks to Long Covid, I have at the most two years to live, probably somewhat less.

Apropos the virus itself, its rapid mutation makes it uncontrollable, an apocalyptic threat that fills me with a difficult to describe mixture of anger and the most profound sadness I have ever known. At age 84, I have no fear of death; I have lived long enough to be exempt from the rightful fury of the younger people whose lives it has stolen and destroyed. But the shameful lack of easily accessible treatment as a classic example of how we the people are so often victimized. Nor can I overlook how the characteristics of the virus make it perfect for socioeconomic and military purposes, which suggests why the facts of its origin remain so difficult to ascertain. (My comment got 80 "Recommends.")

===

Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life. Ms. MacNicol...as an 84-year-old, anti-patriarchal, Marxian, Gaian-pagan male photographer and writer who ultimately refused submission to the soul-killing, spirit-obliterating, mind-destroying oppression of capitalism and its theocratic facilitators, I most wholeheartedly salute you and applaud your assertions. (My comment got 22 "Recommends.")

LB/22 June 2024

--30--

STILL WORKING ON updating essays, a project that has morphed into preparation of an anthology for my post-mortem beneficiaries.  Nevertheless -- journalist to the end -- I spend the first hour or so of every day reading the (real) news, and when a report, analysis or disclosure moves me to do so, I post a comment on the associated thread. (Sometimes, as did the last three comments below, these get rejected, at which point the uplifted-social-finger portion of my alleged mind insists they too be published here.)

********* 

Major Trump trials delayed until after election

Biden is merely the most "plausibly deniable" of the ruling class options for throwing the election to Trump, thus guaranteeing the perpetuation of capitalism by permanently reducing the U.S. to a zero-tolerance Christonazi theocracy. But how many more times must this be said before the Moronic Majority awakens to its looming subjugation?

*********

Two Americas: the Slow Divide

Unfortunately, Mr, Reich, the Christonazis' core belief -- that they have a divine mandate to conquer the world and exterminate all of us who refuse to declare for their demon Jesus -- is bound to overcome the Neoconfederates' isolationism. This will make a second Civil War unavoidable. Which leaves three questions:

(1)-Will the so-called Blue States be able to overcome their anti-gunowner pacifism enough to train and mobilize an effective defense against Waffen-SS-minded Christonazi fanatics? 

(2)-Will the Blue States be able to react fast enough to seize and utilize the military assets within their boundaries?

(3)-Given that the destruction of the United States is in the interest of its  primary global opponents  -- these are Russia and China; probably India; depending on the time-frame, perhaps also a pan-African union -- where will the Blue States (which, thanks to outsourcing by capitalist profiteers, lack the manufacturing capabilities essential to winning even a small war) -- find the allies essential to their victory?

Apropos my use of the "so-called" adjectival prefix in question (1), as someone who's aware of psycho-linguistics, I am infuriated by the Orwellian, silence-dissenters-by-destroying-our-vocabulary methodology obvious in assigning red -- the color (as in the Red Army), of liberation from the Original Nazis, and the color (as in "yeah damn right I'm a Red") of socialism  in general  -- to the permanently Christonazified regions of the "United" (sic) States.

A more truthful color assignment would be derived from our (first?) Civil War: blue for the states remaining true to the best of our founding principles, gray -- or better yet the feldgrau  of Hitler's Wehrmacht -- for the states of the Christonazi Neoconfederacy.

By the way, the same psycho-linguistically malicious subversion of meaning is evident in Trump's theft of socialism's clenched-fist salute.

As to what will actually obtain, I'm sure I'll never get to find out, which admittedly vexes my journalistic curiosity. But there's no escaping the fact I am 84 years old and terminally ill, so I may not even get to find out who wins in November, though I cannot doubt it will be Trump and the final triumph of the permanent nazification that's been underway – mostly by the diabolical cunning of the boiled-frog method – since our plutocratic masters embraced those legions of Original Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms. 

Biden? He's merely the plutocrats' most plausibly deniable method of throwing the election to their new Führer.

A near-lifelong student of history -- also part of the working press c. 1956-1959, 1962-1986 and 2004-2009 --  I've always recognized the murder of President Kennedy as a coup. I recognized the murder of his brother as the end, forever,  of any possibility of a counter-coup; I saw the 1976 election as a final act of surrender; and I recognized the 1980 election as the beginning of the inevitable post-coup national "cleansing," prefaced as it was by the decade of additional political murders that began in 1964. Thus I have long argued that -- assuming our species has  enough future to produce historians (which I gravely doubt) --  22 November 1963 will by the U.S. Empire's equivalent of 4 September 476, the latter the date the Roman Empire died. 

As to which side will win our second Civil War, that  will undoubtedly be determined by who gets the nukes. Which will also determine whether the war stays within the boundaries of the original U.S. or morphs into the apocalypse that exterminates our species and reduces our Mother Earth back to the bug planet she was four million years ago.

*********      

Then and Now: 1968 and 2024
(Second paragraph slightly revised here to correct the error I made by too hastily editing the original.)

I must respectfully disagree with the definitive portion of Mr. Albert's attempt to define what killed the revolutionary potential of the 1960s. While his overview is (superficially) correct – what might be loosely termed "poor choices" did indeed help facilitate the Counterculture's extermination -- those (alleged) “choices” were not caused by any absence of self-sustaining "reason and evidence." Nor were they the sole factor in its destruction. As a near-lifelong professional journalist and an activist in the post-Sputnik Education-Reform, Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam-War, Alternative-Press, Back-to-the-Land, Environmentalist and Occupy movements, I know any (accurate) analysis of such failures must begin with the necessarily painful acknowledgment of how patriarchy combines two distinct  types of force to perpetuate its historically proven omnipotence.

One type is, as Mr. Albert implies, self-inflicted. But Marx’s Manifesto and FDR’s Four Freedoms are potentially as compelling now as they were in 1848 or 1941 respectively; once adopted, their principles are never abandoned by “choice” per se. Instead they are nullified by the methodically conditioned caste, racist, sexist and egotistical hatreds that have ever-more-irreparably fragmented human society since patriarchy’s imposition six or seven millennia ago. Today these hatreds are perpetuated by patriarchal religion and its capitalist derivatives, the latter including the Madison-Avenue-induced, morally imbecilic self-obsession that began as  USia's media-vectored terminal illness and is now fatally infecting all humanity. As intended, the resultant malaise prohibits the solidarity essential to overthrow or even ameliorate patriarchy’s ultimate function as the planet-poisoning, species-exterminating mechanism of a global Final Solution, its dynamic first evidenced by smallpox-envenomed blankets.

Though in 1970 I kept my ideology semi-closeted in an (ultimately doomed) effort to preserve my journalism career, I have been a Marxian since my teens. Thus in June of that year, exiled from my New-York-City birthplace and home, I was relieved to discover most of the women I met in the Pacific Northwest were as feminist as those I knew in Lower Manhattan. But in startling contrast to the males I knew in the City -- a vivid example of how NYC of that era truly was, as James Baldwin put it, Another Country -- most Pacific Northwest males remained stubbornly misogynistic. And it is only here I've repeatedly seen solidarity slain -- even in alternative-press collectives -- by bourgeois antagonism toward alleged socioeconomic inferiors. Nor are these reactionary attitudes much abated; now they are merely camouflaged by language proven false by behavior.

Patriarchy's other movement-destroying force is the escalating sadism of its military and police, their murderous brutality intensified by technological supremacy and psychological terror. These are mandates of what Jeff Sharlet reveals as the “fundamentalism” that dictates USian domestic and foreign policy. In the '70s, it was locally proclaimed on Christian reader-boards: "Organic Is Satanic"; "Environmental Means Of The Devil"; and the far more ubiquitous "God Hates Hippies." Now its proclamations are international news.

Honed to invincibility  by the legions of Nazi war criminals the empire adopted after WWII, the synergistic combination of these internal and external forces perpetuates the reduction of our planet to an ecogenocidal death-camp. As a near-lifelong student of history, I know any notion patriarchy includes  a “moral arc...toward justice” is a tyranny-protecting Big Lie. In a sane world, it would be symptomatic of clinical delusion if not outright dementia. Therefore I see no (logical) escape from the looming apocalypse. But I also know the Gaia Theory does not exclude the possibility of last-minute rescue. Apropos that, let us hope an '80s bumper-sticker -- "Goddess Is Coming and She Is Pissed" -- is more than mere fantasy.

*********

The Supreme Court Might Rescue Trump
(I wrote of "Trumpler" and his "smear-all-putsch" on a sarcastic whim, merely because it rhymes with Hitler and his beer-hall putsch. Nevertheless I believe the comparison is valid, particularly given how Trump has followed Hitler's example of packing the judiciary with puppet judges. It's also noteworthy that some psychics now claim Trump is Hitler's reincarnation, for which go here and here. ) 

As I have been pointing out since well before Trumpler's 6 January smear-all putsch, the USian Christonazis have followed their German Nazi forebears' strategy of packing the judiciary as the one sure means of permanently abolishing democracy without alarming a submissively complacent citizenry. This  nullified all the Weimar Republic's constitutional protections just as it has done likewise to those of the (equally doomed) U.S. republic.  Indeed I would argue that anyone who supposes Trumpler's judiciary would not  declare him  immune to prosecution  is clinically deluded.

We are thus left with three questions:

• (1)-Will the "Democratic" (sic) Party continue the failing Biden candidacy, which -- despite his superficial, intentionally deceptive emulations of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- ever-more-obviously demonstrates the party's post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic)  Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party?

• (2)-Assuming the Democrats  continue  Biden's plausibly deniable pro-Christonazi candidacy (because that is the only option their Wall Street owners allow), will enough voters recognize the infinite horror of the Trumpite threat to vote Biden a second term despite his many flaws?

• (3)-Assuming Trumpler wins, will the so-called "blue states" have the courage necessary to resist the Christonazis' armed might -- but if they do, where will they find the necessary allies?            

Bear in mind too that in reality, it was the Red Army that saved the world from Hitler -- and that in today's world, there is no comparable force to save humanity from Trumpler. (Which is precisely why I'm thankful I'm terminally ill and will therefore most likely be spared Trumpler's concentration camps.)

*********

The following three comment-thread posts were rejected, the first two by the World Socialist Web Site, the third by The New York Times. Apropos the topmost WSWS-suppressed post,  I was initially surprised it did not appear. But on reconsideration,  I realized it was probably censored for two reasons: focused as its moderators are on class warfare, and locked as they are into a fundamentalist definition of dialectical materialism (yes, unfortunately there are Marxian fundamentalists too),  they seem loathe to recognize the Trumpite onslaught is as much a resumption of religious warfare -- specifically Christianity's two-millennia crusade to impose zero-tolerance global theocracy -- as it is a class war; they likewise refuse to acknowledge it is also resumption of the race warfare that has defined European colonialism in the Americas since its birth in 1492. Plus there is the fact the site's moderators are adamantly opposed to any sort of alliance with less-ideologically "pure" Marxians, New Deal advocates or any other sorts of socialists or social democrats, the potential solidarity of such a united front implicit in the best-seller status accorded the disclosures by Jeff Sharlet. About the suppression of my other attempted WSWS post, I can only guess it was killed because the moderators might have  considered it an elaboration on an exposé published earlier this year by Jacobin, which it most assuredly was not; I did not discover that report until tonight, 18 May.  But WSWS moderators harbor an especially intense hatred for Jacobin's semi-official parent organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, because they (correctly) condemn DSA as the "Democratic" (sic) Party's weapon to co-opt and thereby nullify the growing demand for a national alternative to the two (pro-nazi) capitalist parties.  Apropos the NYT-suppressed post,  I can only suppose the editors deemed it too brutally honest to be fit to print.   

***

Nearly 3,000 protesters arrested  in U.S. as crackdown on anti-genocide encampments continues internationally 

Disclosure of how the USian Empire is an ever-more-tyrannical theocracy governed by "secret fundamentalism" -- for which see Jeff Sharlet's The Family (Harper: 2008) and his subsequent works --  shows how all the diverse atrocities of capitalism are expressions of this fundamentalism's  ecogenocidal intent.

Sharlet's ongoing investigation reveals how the "Democratic" (sic) Party's national-prayer-breakfast, post-JFK treachery as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party ideologically enabled the Vietnam War; the destruction of the New Deal; the imposition of economic neoliberalism; the expansion of national and global theocracy; the re-conquest of much of the world by white-supremacist neo-colonialism; the wars for capitalist lebensraum in the Ukraine and Palestine; the Christonazi take-over of the U.S. Supreme Court to guarantee theocratic expansion and permanence; and the militarization of the USian police to suppress any domestic opposition to theocratic subjugation, much as the imperial war machine suppresses such resistance abroad. 

Recognition of how  these atrocities are theocratically connected brings into sharp focus how this "secret fundamentalism" not only justifies capitalism's ecogenocidal greed as divinely ordained, but mandates USian alliance with -- and military support of -- other fundamentalist  theocracies. Ruled as they are by zero-tolerance tyrannies -- Israel by genocidally fundamentalist Judaism and the Western Ukraine by de facto nazis -- the blank-check support given them by the empire is among USian fundamentalism's unapologetic public expressions. 

So is the skyrocketing militarized-police violence unleashed against Occupy, Black Lives Matter and now against pro-Palestine demonstrators. The message here is that in the eyes of the ruling class, we of the 99.9 Percent, regardless of race or ethnicity, are all defined by the N-word -- and will be savaged accordingly should we dare  protest. But once we Marxians begin making these connections obvious, it may also begin to be obvious that -- as an old labor-movement slogan puts it -- an injury to one of us is truly an (intentional) injury to us all.

*********

Fed says interest rates to stay higher longer

Given that the pro-Trump USian ruling class, like its pro-Hitler German ruling-class predecessor, has determined nazism is capitalism's only salvation; given also that resurgent inflation is one of several factors -- including the Biden candidacy itself -- that are ever-more-obviously scripted to ensure Trump's victory in November; it is entirely plausible to assume the Federal Reserve and Wall Street are collaborating to continue victimizing us with ruinous prices and prohibitive interest rates. We already know the price-hikes are expressions of run-amok corporate greed rather than problems of supply and demand, which in turn suggests the Fed's role is that of enabler rather than regulator.

Moreover there's the fact Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is living proof of the "Democratic" (sic) Party's post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. Powell was appointed to the board by Obama, elevated to its chairmanship by Trump and reappointed to that post by Biden. As we should all know by now, Hitler-disciple Trump's appointees were at least Christonazi sympathizers, else they'd never have received the wanna-be Führer's endorsement. Thus Powell's re-appointment by Biden is a tacit endorsement of the Trumpite agenda -- further proof the unprecedentedly unpopular Biden candidacy is the "plausibly deniable" strategy developed by the thoroughly Christonazified spy-and- secret-police apparatus for throwing the election to Trump.

Where the Gaza War itself fits into this strategy remains to be seen, but there's no doubt the violence Biden has unleashed on pro-Palestine demonstrators is intended to goad the youth vote into boycotting the election, thereby further ensuring Trump's victory and the final, permanent reduction of USia to the modern, technologically omnipotent version of a slave-plantation state the financial aristocracy has sought to impose on us at least since the defeat of the Bankers' Plot in 1934.

*********

Biden Is Not Winning. His Campaign Should Stop Acting Like It Is.

Those who persist in proclaiming Biden a certain victor have their heads deep enough in the proverbial sand to blind themselves to two absolute realities. One of these is the fanaticism of the Trumpites, who will vote for him even if he is imprisoned, and some of whom have already pledged armed rebellion to free him should he be locked up. The other is the ultimate indifference of the nation's youth, whose core belief is they -- and ultimately the entire human species -- are doomed, regardless of who wins in November, and who will therefore be easily convinced to refrain from voting, thus to avenge the police brutality they believe Biden has unleashed against their pro-Hamas peers.

The one unknown that might reverse this growing probability for disaster -- the one factor that could save us from an increasingly certain Biden defeat -- is the women's vote. This is rightfully mobilized to near-revolutionary fervor by the theocratic misogyny imposed by the Trumpites' state regimes and perpetuated by the Trumpite seizure of the federal judiciary, the latter an application of the strategy pioneered by the German Nazis. But if the women are convinced their ballots will be nullified by Trumpite anti-voter schemes -- perhaps due to the refusal of Biden to rigorously enforce the few remnants of the Voting Rights Act -- they too may refrain from voting, guaranteeing the transformation of the nation into the de facto Fourth Reich.

LB/1-18 May 2024

-30-

Three of the estimated 6,500 homeless persons who eke out meager livings in Tacoma and Pierce County, WA,  using an outdoor faucet for bath water, 30 May 2023; the owners of the  property have since gated and fenced it, specifically to deny such people access. As noted in "Christonazi Supreme Court Majority,"  below, the tyrannical judges will probably approve the mass arrest of all unhoused victims of capitalism, thereby providing the de facto plantations of the prison-industrial complex with an antebellum-sized supply of slaves. (Photo by Loren Bliss © 2024). 

=========

I AM UPDATING a 12-year-old essay so extensively, the process -- associated research included -- is scarcely different from producing new work. Hence I am not certain when it will be finished, though I am giving it at least six hours of intensely focused effort every day. Because as a near-lifelong journalist I cannot divorce myself from current events,  I will continue publishing comments I've made elsewhere -- just  as I have done below -- whenever I feel it's warranted.

For those unaware of my circumstances, this is part of the proverbial clearing-of-the-decks mandated by the death-sentence Covid imposed on me last summer, which indeed makes me wonder if the vaccination and boosters I dutifully got were nothing more than pacifiers. Yes, I had a pre-existing, potentially fatal condition, specifically congestive heart failure, with a 10-percent loss of atrial valve function. But the CHS had long been stabilized by medication, and the best estimate was I'd  most likely live another ten years. Nor was my osteoarthritis-inflamed spinal injury -- the 1978 gift of one of  Washington state's obscenely graft-protected, judge-coddled, defiantly habitual drunken drivers -- anything more than occasionally crippling. Now, thanks to Covid, my atrial valve loss is 90 percent. Because an incurable jungle-rot fungus I brought home from Korea in 1962 denies me  valve-replacement surgery,  my cardiologist informed me last September I had, at the most,  two years to live -- probably far less  due to looming kidney failure precipitated by the massive doses of diuretics now necessary to compensate for my radically diminished blood circulation. Meanwhile my arthritic pain has become so devastating, I am ambulatory only with a walker, which means I have to do all my shopping online, depend on delivery services to bring me my groceries,  and rely on kind-hearted neighbors to carry my garbage and recycling to the outdoor bins. Even with the walker, there are days I can barely go from one end of my apartment to another.

But as a near-lifelong photographer and writer, there remains a substantial amount of work I hope to complete before this incarnation ends. After I finish the aforementioned revision and perhaps a half-dozen more editing tasks,  there remains the dreadful clerical odium of sorting, filing and cataloging thousands of post-fire pictures and the far more repugnant tedium of keyboarding  type-written or printed texts into electronically accessible formats. Nevertheless, thanks to the Goddess, I am already at peace with my life and circumstances -- more profoundly at peace than ever I imagined I could be -- no matter  what I am able to accomplish in my remaining time.

=========

Persecution in the Lord’s Name: a remarkably courageous, properly infuriating expose´ of how the federal government’s theocratic interpretation of “religious freedom” as the right of Christians to express their doctrinal, implicitly ecogenocidal sadism within their organizational realms -- never mind that beyond those boundaries, their biblically mandated viciousness would not only be criminally unconstitutional, but in most cases feloniously so.

Despite my applause for Ms. Lee's courageous exposure of Christianity's intrinsic hatefulness and LAP's bravery in publishing it, history compels me to reject her underlying assumptions:

(1)-Regardless of claims to the contrary, the three core principles of Christianity -- likewise of the other two Abrahamic religions (Judaism and Islam) -- are inescapably hateful. These are: (A)-the claim its deity is "the (only) true god; (B)-the claim its followers are "the (only) divinely-chosen people"; and (C)-the ecogenocidal misogyny by which these claims are enforced. Claims (A) and (B) establish each of the three Abrahamic religions as rival, master-race cults of ubermenschen. They are at war with one another, and with all the rest of us -- pagans, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha'i, First Nations traditionalists, agnostics, atheists, etc. -- simply because, by definition, you can have only one master race per planet. Thus the religious wars that characterize the entire history of patriarchy will not end until the present (alleged) civilization has destroyed itself, probably by exterminating our entire species and reducing our Mother Earth to the bug planet she was 400 million years ago. Which brings us to (C), the relentless misogyny demanded by each of these credos. This hatred of all femaleness originates from the patriarchal fear of the re-emergence of the Great Goddess, the Divine Mother who was our species' primary deity until the patriarchal revolution began its rape-and-murder conquest six or seven millennia ago. While the Goddess was its initial target, the patriarchs quickly recognized femaleness itself was a doorway through which she could re-emerge. Thus the sadistic Abrahamic god's vengeance against Eve, cursing us all for her "original sin," damning all females and non-hetero-normative persons as her potentially demonic collaborators. Thus too these religions' ecogenocidal histories, most especially the rape of the planet that, barring a genuine miracle, has already doomed us to extinction. And since these atrocities are the products of scriptural mandates, to claim any Abrahamic religion can be reshaped into anything less murderously hateful is no less deluded than claiming that Nazism, which is based on the biblical-caliber hatefulness of its messiah as expressed in Mein Kampf, can be converted to humanitarianism.

(2)-Like it or not, the 13 colonies were founded as Christian theocracies; the anti-First-Nations ecogenocide was mandated by the invaders' theology (see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States); and despite the Founders' courageous efforts to make the fledgling U.S a genuinely secular state, the Machiavellian-minded financial aristocracy -- recognizing the historically proven effectiveness of Christianity as an ultimate weapon of oppression -- has always worked to subvert the founders' intent and ensure the USian empire is forever tyrannized by what Jeff Sharlet has courageously exposed as "the secret fundamentalism" of its governance. Our Masters' most recent weapon of forcible Christianization is The Family, the group whose nazified methodology and terrifyingly global influence is documented by Sharlet. Its successes include the permanently Christonazi U.S. Supreme Court and -- in all probability -- the looming re-election of Trump, which will mark the beginning of a new Holocaust, the death-toll of which will shrink its (equally Christianity-enabled) German Nazi prelude to a mere footnote. What began as zero-tolerance theocracy shall ever remain so.

(3)-For these reasons, the lawsuits encouraged by Ms. Lee are absurd. Given the permanence of Christonazi control of the judiciary, the plaintiffs have absolutely no -- say again, no -- possibility of success. Our liberation -- if we truly seek it -- must therefore be achieved by other strategies and tactics.

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Revolt in the Universities: protesting students across the U.S. face mass arrests, suspension, eviction and expulsion. Those who live on campus are summarily evicted, thereby condemned to homelessness just as the Christonazi-dominated U.S.  Supreme Court seems posed to make homelessness a crime, thereby providing the prison-industrial complex with a potentially unlimited supply of slaves.   

My contribution was in response to an otherwise accurate comment-thread post that erroneously stated Nixon had begun the war against student activism:

Actually, Mr. Weir  -- with no disagreement with your overall assertions implied or intended --  the punitive use of USian universities  was established well before the Nixonazi regime. Google "Censorship: Lessons from Ralph Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity," without the quotation marks.

("Censorship" is not linked in the original because the site does not allow URLs.)

===

A Long Way Down: an elderly upper-middle-class male describes how -- once an older person is flung into unemployment by the reigning economic savagery -- capitalist viciousness nullifies a lifetime history of significant professional success. Includes supportive statistics.

This -- Mr. Suarez’s self-portrait as an unimpeachable, absolutely blameless  victim of the ecogenocidal sadism of capitalism (which our Masters will intensify beyond even the German-Nazi magnitude of Evil once the U.S. Supreme Court, the "Republican" [sic] Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party and their "Democratic Party" [sic]  Fifth Column finish handing Trump the presidency and turning the USian Empire into the de facto Fourth Reich, all to ensure capitalism's permanence with a New Holocaust and guarantee its [intended] outcomes) -- is by far the most relevant essay I've yet seen in LAP.

Hence my most heartfelt thanks to Mr. Suarez for having the defiant, revolutionary-caliber bravery to write it and to LAP for having the courage to publish it -- though it should have been given lead-story status.

(And what is this "[intended] outcome"  of capitalism? Think of it -- and the toxins of patriarchy from which its own venom is derived -- as the ideological equivalents of smallpox-contaminated blankets. Their collective purpose is revealed by the apocalyptic consequences they irremediably inflict:  extermination of our species, extinction of all other advanced life-forms, and reduction of our Mother Earth to the overheated bug planet she was four million years ago.)   

As implied in my comment, I believe the story portrays the doom that awaits any of us who are not part of the Ruling Class -- that is,  any of us whose survival depends on our ability to earn adequate salaries or wages. 

===

In Supreme Court arguments, Biden administration demands unrestricted power to separate families "without judicial oversight."

This case provides another (particularly vivid)  example of how, beneath the camouflage nets of capitalist propaganda, the only (real) difference between the "Democratic" (sic) Party and the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party is their relative speeds of intended subjugation. The Christonazis and their allies want zero-tolerance white-supremacist Christian theocratic tyranny imposed immediately, while the Democrats -- still trying to hide their tyrannical malevolence behind a screen of  "plausible deniability" -- want to impose it more by stealth,  no doubt in the belief a more gradual enslavement will condition us to be more accepting of our  powerlessness and thus far less likely to revolt.    

===

Ten Times More Toxic Pesticide will poison our foods if EPA approves agro-monopoly demand.   

A vital story the imperial mainstream media is ignoring -- again proving its function as the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit model of Josef Goebbel's Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. 

I always wash my celery and tomatoes before eating. I use warm water and dish detergent, then rinse well. Old and on a fixed income, too physically disabled to hunt, fish and organically subsistence garden as I did for so many years, I cannot afford the 30 to 60 percent higher costs of allegedly "organic" vegetables. However, washing store-bought vegetables is merely an intuitive solution;  though I am a skilled researcher, I have never found any information about how to cleanse fruits and vegetables of the (genocidal) toxins inflicted on us by the imperial agricultural cabal. Does  anyone know if this cleaning is sufficient?  Please respond...

The following was my response to another comment on the same thread:

Apropos the pending EPA decision -- and given that the permanently Christonazified U.S. Supreme Court is obviously doing everything with in its power to guarantee Trump a second term,  we know what it will be -- perhaps now the USian left will finally stop its suicidal rejection of our Masters' (repeatedly demonstrated) intent to exterminate most of the 99.9 Percent as  mere "right-wing conspiracy theory."

An adjunct-faculty college instructor  in the late '70s and early '80s, I know genocidal reduction of the working class was even then favored by many  environmental science majors. Therefore I find it entirely credible University of Texas Professor Erik Pianka (for whom google) would urge the methodical extermination of 90 percent of the human species -- never mind the story was broken by a publication infamous for its Ayn Rand rebranding of Hitler's ubermenschen ethos. Ideology should not blind us to truth, particularly when it is already proven beyond dispute by our Masters' weaponization of Covid, for which see the World Socialist Web Site, hardly a "right wing"  outlet.

Links in italicized text excluded from original because the site does not allow URLs.

===

Christonazi Supreme Court Majority seems ready to approve mass arrest of homeless people.

This should surprise no one who acknowledges four irrefutable truths about capitalism: firstly, that the U.S. Supreme Court is doing everything within its power to guarantee Trump a second term (and thereby convert the USian Empire to the de facto Fourth Reich); secondly, that criminalizing homelessness  will clear the way for the Trumpite-promised mass arrest and lifetime concentration-camp enslavement of anyone too poor to afford housing. Which -- thirdly and as intended -- will  provide our Christonazi/Neoconfederate Masters with the antebellum-magnitude slavery they deem necessary to restore their profiteering to the unlimited maximums defended by the old Confederacy. Fourthly, let us never forget that while U.S.  capitalism -- shaped as it was by the legions of Original Nazi war criminals our Masters adopted as advisors after WWII -- is capitalism's most unapologetically sadistic global form, its ecogenocidal intent is shared by all capitalists everywhere.

Self-explanatory; no further comment necessary.

===

Inside the Crisis at NPR: Listeners are tuning out. Sponsorship revenue has dipped. A diversity push has generated internal turmoil. Can America’s public radio network turn things around?

The New York Times included my response on this report's comment thread:

At least some of the decline in the NPR audience -- like the declines in other media usage (and no doubt like the decline in younger people's interest in elections) -- is fueled by their increasing conviction we are a doomed species on a dying planet. For those who hold such views, all other events, elections included, are reduced to irrelevance. And every younger person I know -- "younger" defined as folks in their 30s and 40s (about a dozen people, all professionals or skilled workers of one sort or another) -- is not only resigned to the inevitability of our species' extinction, but in that context of bottomless hopelessness increasingly regards the news (and current events in general) as nothing more than a best-avoided intensifier of depression.

LB/28 April 2024

-30-

And It Will Not Matter to the MAHAs Whether We're Marxians or New Dealers; Male, Female, Nonbinary or LGBTQ; Caucasian or Peoples of Color; Pagan, Indigenous Traditional, Agnostic, Atheist or Spiritually Indifferent

I BEGAN THIS essay as an intended contribution to the discussion thread of the World Socialist Web Site’s mostly well-done 18 March report about the Nex Benedict atrocity, but the ferocity of my reaction -- delight at the censorship-defying boldness of its disclosures, disgust at its editorial flaws, fury at yet another  Christonazi outrage -- seems to have (unintentionally) invoked the Muse. Thus was I thrust into the  Zen-like trance that often births the most intense expressions of my sensibilities.  A right-brain state defined by the eerie sense of having involuntarily become a conduit rather than a source,  its irresistible momentum is as ultimately indescribable as it is welcome. It had frequently enhanced my photojournalistic gavotte  and the guitar-accompanied recitals of traditional folk music I am now permanently denied by arthritis, and it has often given me, in a single encounter, the entire content  of what might justifiably be considered a poem or at least a poetic rumination, but never until now has it uninterruptedly yielded a complete body of prose. And  when my left brain yanked me from its enchantment, I was decidedly startled by its 11-hour suspension of physical awareness and the surprising fact my text had grown far beyond the very reasonable 400-word WSWS comment-limit.

In retrospect, I cannot doubt the death of Nex Benedict was --  at least for me -- the mental equivalent of the proverbial last straw. I am the son of a man purged for his Marxian politics by the post-WWII  U.S.  government, and much as he was, a near-lifelong student of history. I began learning in my early teens of the historical USian penchant for embracing its own variants of nazism. I recognized nazism's appeal in the skyrocketing popularity  -- especially amongst southern whites -- of Ayn Rand's turgid fictionalizations of the  übermenschen ethos central to  Mein Kampf  -- never mind she wrote as wretchedly as Hitler himself. I saw the yearning for nazism implicit in segregation and the federal government's devious censorship of the mainstream press.  My father cross-referenced 1964 Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater's speeches to their Mein Kampf origins, a meticulously researched work he offered as campaign ammunition to local officials of Lyndon Baines Johnson's "Democratic" (sic) Party, men who vehemently rejected it, no doubt because, unbeknownst to us voters, the Democrats were even then the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Fifth Column they have so obviously since become. I've experienced countless flickers of worry and disgust generated by the steady encroachment of USian nazism ever since. But there is a profound difference between my psychologically guarded journalistic objectification of the Christonazi threat and  the sudden bayonet-thrust of woe  and dread  that pierced me to the heart when first I viewed the obituary portrait of Nex and was seized, smitten and overwhelmed by its wrenching similarity to the obituary portrait of the murdered woman who was Heather Heyer.

The psychic kinship of the two photos spawned a momentary mental maelstrom that flashed through my own vivid memories of raggedly impoverished Knox County children needfully scavenging random lumps of coal from Vestal's L&N tracks and churned them into a wrenching spiral of dystopian imagery that mixed wirephotos of assassinations, wars and mass murder with my own decades of textual and photographic witness to socioeconomic despair and its expression via demonstration, riot and metaphysical rebellion. Then it replaced the stab of terror inflicted by the visually confirmed certainty of doom with an indescribably  down-pressing pang of grief at cultural loss that lumped my throat and brought tears to my eyes. Suffice it to say my right brain now feels the fist-in-the-face, boot-in-the-crotch, truncheon-across-the-spine  toxicity of what my left brain hitherto de-emotionalized by the distancing essential to journalistic  abstraction.   (I am sorry I cannot say it better; I apologize for my gross ineptitude at expressing my own emotions.) 

As a result I now know a bit more about the psychological dimensions of the victimization of Nex Benedict and the martyrdom of Heather Heyer and the skyrocketing frequency of  hate-motivated mass murder and the statistically camouflaged but undoubtedly soaring executions of uncounted USians by the murderously weaponized bigotries of intentionally fatal neglect and homicidally relentless persecution and how all these atrocities signify USia's headlong, unabashedly joyful embrace of the same bottomless evil knowingly embraced by the German electorate between the 6-January-2022 equivalent of the 1923 Beer-Hall Putsch and the death-stroke dealt the Weimar Republic by von Hindenburg's appointment of Hitler as Reichkanzler a decade later. 

The intensity of my reaction was prompted by my realization our masters' deliberate resurrection and re-empowerment of our species' most relentlessly ecogenocidal foes of humanitarian empathy compel us all to reflect on Martin Niemöller's  confession and its ever-more-obvious USian variant, "first  they came for the women and the LGBTQ people..." thus   to recognize the fatal persecution of Nex and the murder of Heather and all the women assaulted in what is now obviously an organized attack by New York City misogynists  exemplify the fate the Christonazis will inflict on all of us who dare oppose them regardless of our race, ethnicity,  gender, ideology, spirituality or lack thereof. In that sense, we are literally already all targeted as were Nex Benedict and Heather Heyer and every other such victim. 

Nor can I doubt our future -- however long it may last before global capitalism's  now-obviously inevitable  apocalypse terminates the patriarchal perversion of “civilization” -- will be increasingly defined by Charlotteville-caliber violence and the constant escalation thereof.¹ As I have repeatedly said to my friends and comrades, if the second civil war I now fear is inevitable actually occurs, the so-called “winner” will be determined by whichever side gets the nukes, never mind the doomsday ruin sure to be inflicted by their use.

A slightly revised version of my original essay -- the writing I initially intended as a comment-thread contribution -- begins beneath this prelude’s footnote.

__________________

¹See for example -- if you can find it (and afford its outrageous censorship-by-price cost -- the late David Smail’s profoundly relevant Power Interest and Psychology: Elements of a social materialist understanding of distress, PCCS Books, UK: 2007.

*****

DESPITE THE LAUDABLE breadth of Chase Lawrence's analysis, the WSWS piece that evoked my response is unfortunately headlined “Questions remain surrounding Nex Benedict’s death following release of autopsy summary,” a statement rendered absurd and therefore meaningless by the sort of misplaced modifier that exemplifies the distracting grammatical errors too many of us -- through no fault of our own -- are increasingly too poorly educated to avoid or correct. In any of my years as a supervising editor, I'd have caustically demanded to know if Nex had indeed died while tracking the summary's publication, which is precisely what the head says happened, and which makes it grammatically incomprehensible to those for whom English is a secondary language.   But I suppressed that impulse until now, when I realized it is more respectful to flag the error than to ignore it -- and to remind us, en passant, that correct grammar is essential for effective communication, without which the clarity of mind necessary for successful revolution remains out of reach. Minimizing our ability to understand one another is therefore one of the (intended) consequences of our masters' definitively anti-revolutionary restriction of our access to education. It is yet another expression, albeit a far more subtle one, of the zero-tolerance agenda that employs bigotry as thought-control and therefore as (another) weapon to suppress us, we of the 99.9 Percent, the working class, which makes it relevant to the present discussion.

(For the record, here is the head as it should have been written, counted to fit the space of the original and properly phrased -- as all heads should be -- in the active voice:  Autopsy summary fails to answer questions of authorities' complicity in Nex Benedict's death.)

Unfortunately, Comrade Lawrence buries his most damning conclusion -- and therefore his proper lead -- in the less-than-adequately developed details of his 12th paragraph; this is the fact the circumstances of Nex Benedict's death prove it to have been yet another psychologically engineered (and therefore "plausibly deniable") murder inflicted by relentless Christonazi sadists. Its burial thus minimizes the significance of how the suicide diagnosis thus becomes -- regardless of its officially authoritative medical source --  a maliciously victim-blaming deception.

Nevertheless, Lawrence's text contains many laudable elements. So does Christopher Wiggens' report, in the 22 March edition of The Advocate.  Wiggens leads with how humanitarians  are again legitimately infuriated by Oklahoma's permanently Christonazified governance -- this time aboil with wrath provoked by the local obersturmbannführers who've honored Nex's de facto executioners with school-approved, prosecutor-guaranteed, police protected immunity. Wiggens also details the glaring scientific improbability of the suicide verdict, facts of which I don't doubt the mainstream media’s billionaire-owned, for-maximum-profit variant of Josef Goebbel’s Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda deliberately sought to deny us.  Like Lawrence, Wiggens exposes the extent to which the methodical, potentially deadly persecution of LGBTQ students is already institutionalized as official policy throughout the emergent Christonazi confederacy. And Lawrence's report  includes documentation of the ever-intensified misery deliberately inflicted on all K-12 students, LGBTQ or not, as even the so-called blue states are forced ever closer to unabashed nazism.

But each of these reports follow the seemingly mandatory practice by all USian news media -- whether alternative or mainstream -- of ignoring how our national history  shows  such persecution is neither sociological coincidence nor cultural anomaly. In infinitely damning fact, the history of USian bigotry is so uniquely ecogenocidally murderous, it -- like its racism-inspired, corporate-financed eugenics, -- were the working models from which Hitler built his Holocaust. These are therefore the only constant (and thus truly defining) qualities this nation has ever possessed. In other words, the alleged “founding principles” of the so-called “United States” have never been more than colossal Big Lies.

A contributing element in Nex's victimization is the fact so many in my generation, like the Baby-Boomers who came after us, were arrogantly delusional enough to convince themselves activism alone had permanently purged USian society of its oft-denied but irrevocably defining ideology of interwoven hatreds. (That same arrogance led many of my fellow activists to foolishly imagine it was our anti-war protests -- not the indomitable courage of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People's Army and the sustained militance of their Soviet benefactors -- that forced the USian Empire's panicked retreat from Vietnam¹.) Apropos USia's defining bigotry, certainly we knew a few sparks of our nation's signature ethos smoldered on, particularly in the perpetually hateful theocracy of the white Christian South, but we smugly assumed the metaphorical dampers had been closed by legislation, that whatever cinders remained would eventually be extinguished. Obviously we were  deranged; our assumption USia's historically dominant lynch-mob ethos² could be suppressed by any methods less stringent than those by which the Red Army cleansed Europe of the Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazis is now proven false. 

The proof -- an irrefutable and properly terrifying real-world parallel to Harry Turtledove's fictional denunciation of pacifism³ -- is of course the fact it took Hitler-disciple Trump and his bring-back-Auschwitz-legions of Christonazi Neoconfederates only a few public exhalations of unabashed hatefulness to blow  the seemingly dead embers of bigotry into a nation-destroying conflagration that rages more apocalyptically with every passing minute.  Wildly cheering their "grab-'em-by-the-pussy" führer with  Zieg-Heil-equivalent chants of "USA! USA! USA!," the malevolent minions of the second of our species' three fatally competitive ecogenocide-by-divine-commandment theologies make no secret of their fanatical intent to replace our sorely wounded republic with a zero-tolerance white Christian male-supremacist theocracy, thereby fulfilling the initially clandestine, now triumphantly brazen⁴ plot behind our masters' addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.

Thus their favorite acronym --  MAGA (for "Make America Great Again") -- is a lie. Were it truthful,  it would be MAHA: "Make America Hate Again." 

But the significance of MAHA as the renewal of our nation's longstanding, chronic (and therefore definitive) malignancy remains deftly hidden by one of the most effective means of self-protection the USian ruling class has yet devised -- that is, by cleverly inducing and perpetuating our mind-crippling national aversion to studying history, chiefly by ensuring it is force-fed to impressionable adolescents as an infinitely boring tedium of dates and names of people and locales proctored by so-called “educators,” typically athletic coaches specifically chosen because they are too dimwitted to effectively narrate the dramatic events that connect the names with the dates and geography. Indeed they are but disguised propagandists, too fanatically “American” to dare explore beyond government-mandated texts, much less allow any questioning of the texts’ often misleading or unequivocally false conclusions.

Yes, the standard method of using coaches to teach history, civics and other social studies is yet another manifestation of how our masters -- whose primary intent is obstructing our ability to revolt -- deliberately deny us vital education. A further example is the unquestionably deliberate infliction of ideological confusion by dubbing the emergent realms of Christonazi/Neoconfederate secession as “Red States,” thereby obscuring the original meaning of the term “Red” as a synonym for Marxian and the fact the Red Army literally saved the world from the (primarily) German manifestation of Christonazism’s predecessor.

The One Percenters know that were the resultant ignorance ever overcome, we of the 99.9 Percent would no doubt quickly acknowledge history's overwhelmingly conclusive body of circumstantial evidence -- a weight of proof far beyond what's necessary for conviction in a court-of-law -- that, for example, proves the assassination of President Kennedy was the hinge-pin in a bipartisan, multi-generation, two-century nazification scheme that  began with the Bankers’ Plot of 1933.⁵ History also informs us the Banksters’ underlying ruling-class vindictiveness was nothing new – that it is easily traceable to the bipartisan racist treachery that ended Reconstruction in 1877. .

Our present circumstances, MAHA included, were imposed on us by the ruling class after the Red Army's epic victory at Stalingrad made it clear Germany would lose the war. Their original intent had obviously been to openly ally the U.S. with Germany as soon as the Third Reich and its allies won the war. But fearing the extermination of nazism was the prelude to the extinction of capitalism itself, the banksters of 1933 -- granted lifetime congressional immunity in 1934, and since then ever-more-protected by wealth and privilege --  further reinforced themselves and their collaborators  by secretly compelling the government's adoption of innumerable Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazi war criminals as their co-conspirators. The  Original Nazis' unprecedented skill at sadistically industrializing mass murder and irresistibly propagating  collective deception was applauded by Hitler himself as heralding the emergence of a fanatically aggressive  "new man," representative of a people genetically programmed for unquestioning loyalty to their masters and immune to any moral, ethical or empathetic restraints that might obstruct their obedient savagery. And it granted the USian ruling class precisely the weapons it needed to impose its intended postwar global empire.

Subsequent U.S. history clearly reveals the Kennedy assassination's most undeniable consequence is its permanent reduction of the "Democratic" (sic) Party to the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- the function first irrefutably demonstrated by JFK-successor Lyndon Johnson's subsequently revealed role as chief provocateur of the Vietnam (actually Southeast Asian) War. Since then, the Democrats' Fifth-Column treachery has been repeatedly affirmed by their innumerable betrayals of popular will and the ruinous debacles so enabled, MAHA included. Quoth an  old GRU ⁶ proverb: "once is coincidence, twice is alarming, thrice is enemy action."

What the Christonazis now do openly and without restraint, their "Democratic" (sic) Fifth Column has long enabled in a variety of "plausibly deniable" ways, not just LBJ's Southeast Asian onslaught, but Carter's undeniable  Hyde-Amendment betrayal, the Clintons' equally undeniable health-care and welfare betrayals and the apparently deliberate losses of national elections in 1968, 1980, 2000 and 2016. Each of these defeats were foreseen far in advance by suppressed, ignored or media-camouflaged analyses and should thus be investigated as expressions of criminal intent; that each has  imposed ecogenocidal triumphs is clear suggestion of motive and purpose. Chief amongst these consequences -- permanent Christonazi/Neoconfederate seizure of the federal judiciary -- is now nullifying every progressive  measure enacted since the (first?) Civil War. In this context it is thus entirely rational to assume the Christonazis’ long-range scheming includes the court’s 21^st Century restoration of its 1857 Dred Scott Decision.

While the national legitimization of MAHA bigotry that killed Nex Benedict and Heather Heyer is obviously one of the Christonazis' top priorities, the Democrats' backroom role as its enabler proves the two parties' collaboration in its probably terminal nationwide resurrection, not just to former lynch-mob intensities, but ultimately to the death-camp magnitude Hitler-disciple Trump's endorsement of theocracy  is again making publicly palatable.  

Meanwhile the already unprecedented unpopularity of President Biden is cunningly intensified to a toxicity no propaganda could possibly overcome -- firstly by the (entirely predictable) denunciations of the president by Trumpite functionary Robert Hur, whom the Biden Regime self-destructively appointed as special prosecutor; and now by the USian economy's newest statistical relapse into inflation. Known to be inflicted solely by unchecked corporate greed, that should leave us all legitimately wondering if (or when) it might skyrocket into a Trumpist variant of Pinochet's deadly, University-of-Chicago-sponsored "economic shock treatment."

Thus the irremediable odium of Biden's candidacy is obviously the Democrats' latest  "plausibly deniable" method for throwing an election -- clearly another manifestation of "change we can believe in," a magnitude of malignant mass deception Josef Goebbels and his U.S.-adopted henchmen would most assuredly endorse with hearty Zieg Heils. 

In this dire context, the MAHA persecution and death of Nex Benedict -- whatever its medical circumstances -- is, like the MAHA murder of Heather Heyer and the attacks on New York women, a terrifying prophecy of all our fates unless we of the 99 Percent set aside our egotistical differences and unite in our species' one remaining option for survival -- the militant socialism of revolutionary working-class solidarity. As Heather said in the eerily appropriate epitaph her last Facebook post became, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."

__________________

¹Classic photo of the frantic U.S. retreat from Saigon.

²See also "Racial Violence in the United States Since 1526" for a more complete chronology of attacks against Blacks.

³"The Last Article" (full text of the short story in question).

⁴See also "How 'One Nation' Didn't Become 'Under God' Until The '50s Religious Revival,"  "How Long Have We Really Been ‘One Nation Under God’?" and "Views of the U.S. as a ‘Christian nation’ and opinions about ‘Christian nationalism’"

⁵See also the Harper’s Magazine report of Prescott Bush’s central role in the plot and additional details provided by a much more omprehensive report published in Rolling Stone.

⁶See also Spetsnaz GRU.

LB/18 March-6 April 2024

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(NOTE:  this February extra edition is prompted by two stories, each below. The first is the perplexing suppression of my reminder -- a review of historical facts -- that Trump's political embrace of Christianity is another example of how he's following Adolf Hitler's methodology for seizing power. The second reveals the national mainstream media's  outrageous delay in reporting the apparent murder of a nonbinary teen at a public high school in the Christian theocracy of  Oklahoma.)

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TRUMP'S TERRIFYING ADMIRATION  of Adolf Hitler and his repeated application of der Führer's methodologies of deception and subversion have become so obvious, even the USian  mainstream-media monopoly -- the world's first privately owned, for-(maximum)-profit model of Josef Goebbels' Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda  (Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) --  now openly acknowledges it.

Nevertheless, the World Socialist Web Site's refusal to publish the following comment-thread submission demonstrates a perplexing unwillingness to inform us of yet another of Trump's terrifyingly seductive emulations of Hitler. This is Trump's oft-asserted, always enthusiastic  embrace of USian Christianity's fanatically ecogenocidal theocrats, which closely parallels Hitler's many collaborative endorsements of the equally hateful, similarly murder-minded factions in European Christianity, the papacy of Pius XII included.  Here is what I submitted to WSWS  on 22 February in response to "Alabama court ruling on embryos: A sweeping attack on democratic rights and science," (the comment's expansions for publication here indicated by  boldface type):

Thanks to the mind-crippling ignorance of history cunningly imposed by USian "education" (sic) -- in this instance an ignorance maliciously abetted by the brazen lies of theocratic propagandists -- most of us don't know of Hitler's enthusiastic support for Christianity. It takes a bit of research to ferret out the fact Hitler used Christianity as perhaps his most effective means of perpetuating the population's submissiveness to zero-tolerance subjugation, which -- not coincidentally -- is exactly as it is being employed again today. (For the terrifying truth about the union of Hitler, Nazism and Christianity, google "Adolf Hitler on Christianity: Quotes," without the quotation marks of course.)

From the cited source: "Despite how often Christian apologists try to argue that Adolf Hitler is an example of the evil caused by atheism and secularism, the truth is that Hitler often proclaimed his own Christianity, how much he valued Christianity, how important Christianity was to his life, and even how much he was personally inspired by Jesus - his 'Lord and Savior'...'The national Government sees in both Christian denominations the most important factor for the maintenance of our society':  Adolf Hitler, speech before the Reichstag, March 23, 1933, just before the Enabling Act is passed."

See also: the English edition of Positive Christianity in the Third Reich (complete, easily readable text).

Supplemental background from The Daily Beast: available on Netflix, The Family is a carefully documented, legitimately terrifying adaptation-cum-expansion of The Family (2008) and C Street (2010), two nonfiction books by Jeff Sharlet, These warn us, "the most powerful club in America is a consortium of religious true believers bound by their fanatical love of Jesus...It works overtime to avoid publicity. Its ranks are comprised of both Republicans and Democrats...Their unabashed goal is a global Christian theocracy—no morality, or democracy, required...In line with their long-standing fondness for authoritarians (including Hitler and Mao), the Family views Trump as a kindred spirit who understands that some are predestined to rule over others...The Family lifts the veil of secrecy surrounding this shadowy outfit, and what it reveals is a new world order that’s not only on its way—it’s already here."

Thus the ever-more-tyrannical USian proclamations of Christian fanaticism, whether in Alabama or elsewhere, are no surprise to those of us who (correctly) recognize the addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 (link added) tacitly declared the United States a (white) Christian theocracy, precisely as these fanatics themselves now defiantly proclaim.   Until 2016, slowly but surely, often imperceptibly and always with venomously predatory stealth, the theocrats relentlessly tightened their ultimately apocalyptic stranglehold on public opinion. Since then, the Christians'* triumphant resurrection of Hitler in the person of Trump allows them to brazenly reveal their sadistically patriarchal theology as the ecogenocidal manifestation of infinite evil its history of tyranny and persecution proves it to be.

As for the submission of the "Democratic" (sic) Party, that is but another proof of its post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

And unless we of the global working class unite in world-wide socialist resistance, the fanatical worshipers of its deified symbol of sadism, tyranny and apocalyptic doom will indeed enslave, then exterminate our species and in the process reduce our Mother Earth back to a bug planet.

*(Note: despite its deceptive claims to the contrary, all Christianity -- and in fact all Abrahamic religion -- is founded on the cosmic misogyny asserted in Genesis, the apocalyptic doctrine by which even Nature herself is implicitly cursed as evil. That's the primary reason Christianity always, as irrefutably proven by its two-thousand-year history, reverts to tyranny. Therefore, until the non-Christonazi churches unite to set aside their theological cowardice and condemn Christonazism in the harshest terms possible, I will not modify "Christian" with any conciliatory adjectives, for in this matter, their craven silence is in fact consent to the imposition of Christonazi theocracy.)

***

NATIONAL MAINSTREAM MEDIA took at least eight days -- for some outlets the delay approached two weeks -- to report the apparent murder of the late Nex Benedict, though a source I know to be 100-percent reliable informs me Tik-Tok -- today's equivalent of the alternative press that so effectively served USians during the fifth, sixth and seventh decades of the 20th century -- had the story almost immediately. The delay is significant; the 16-year-old high school student was assertively nonbinary, for which they were savagely bullied. They were also of First-Nations ancestry. Regardless of a questionable effort by local police to raise doubts about the  cause of their death, Benedict is thus yet another casualty of the forcible imposition of Christonazi theocracy on a formerly secular nation. Their victimization in a probable a hate-crime should therefore have been instant national news -- all the more so since they suffered the fatal misfortune of living in Oklahoma, another of the 22 states conquered by Christonazi theocrats, which like all its counterparts in the Trumpite neo-confederacy encourages its murderous fanatics to run amok.

Given these circumstances, I cannot but wonder if the plutocrats who own and control the mainstream media (propaganda) apparatus have given orders to back off on the coverage of the forcible imposition of  Christonazi theocracy and the deadly consequences thereof.

Meanwhile, exactly as predicted,  the Christonazis are radically expanding their war against sexual freedom far beyond resurrecting the persecution of  LGBTQ folks and reducing all women to reproductive slavery; now they say they'll  prohibit "recreational sex" by banning all forms of contraception,

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Posted on Another Website
Why Won’t Biden Wave His Magic Wand to Stop Israel?

Based on the post-JFK history of the "Democratic" (sic) Party functioning as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party, for Ms. Kolhatkar (or anyone else) to assume the Democrats truly want to retain the presidency is like assuming the Republicans want to preserve constitutional governance. 

Indeed, the Democrats' history of methodically back-stabbing  its voters -- note LBJ's Warren-Commission deception and Tonkin-Gulf betrayal;  the Senate Democrats' overwhelming-majority collaboration with Nixon to put Powell-Memo author Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court (look it up); Carter's Hyde Amendment misogyny; Hillary's health-care scam, proven so by the huge "job-well-done" payoff via the health-insurance cabal's 1996 campaign contributions (again, look it up); Slick Willie's maliciously genocidal betrayal of welfare recipients;  Obama's devastating turnabouts on union card-check  and single-payer health care; the innumerable promises likewise broken by congressional, state and local Democrats -- all this proves Biden is merely following the Democrats' updated Fifth Column playbook. In other words, he's deliberately throwing the election by "plausibly deniable" means.

Barack the Betrayer's "change we can believe in" is thus again revealed as both the most injurious Big Lie in U.S. presidential history -- note what it did to voter turnout -- and as the One Percent's triumphantly snickering declaration the only genuinely believable "change" is that which methodically worsens our lot.

Recognizing this, it should surprise no one that some of  us on the real left are beginning to wonder if Obama's radical inflammation of the never-extinguished embers of the white electorate's murderous racism into its present-day Trumpite  conflagration might well have been intentional fulfillment of his presidency's clandestine ruling-class purpose.

Thus too it seems increasingly obvious Biden is nothing more than the ruling-class tool forged to shoehorn Trump -- or some other Christonazi/Neoconfederate Hitler -- into the White House, thereby fulfilling what history would tell us (were we allowed to properly study it), has been the One Percent's top priority since the 1930s.

***

To clarify: under the present circumstances, I do not suggest (and will never suggest) we vote for an alternative-party candidate or protest by refusing to vote. I passionately hope Biden will voluntarily resign his candidacy, as it is increasingly unlikely he can beat Trump. But if Biden remains on the ballot – and if I am still alive in November – I will indeed vote for him. Why? Because he will be  our only alternative for delaying Hitler-disciple Trump's final transformation of the U.S. into the de facto Fourth Reich and thereby postponing the civil war that will almost certainly follow in response to Trumpite military invasions of non-Christonazi states and the attendant genocidal persecution of sexual, racial, genetic, physical and psychological minorities.  

LB/25 February 2024

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PRESENT-DAY POLITICS make it obvious neither of the two major parties give a flying rat-fuck about majority opinion. The "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party is fanatically waging ever-escalating warfare against a burgeoning coalition of ever-more-legitimately infuriated women, people of color, sexual minorities, social democrats and socialists.  Meanwhile the so-called Republicans' post-JFK Fifth Column, the so-called "Democratic" (sic) Party,  is meanwhile dead set on re-sodomizing the electorate with the most rightfully unpopular president in modern memory -- thus enabling the final slaughter of the (very) few remnants of our former pretense of "liberty and justice for all."  But -- at least to my knowledge -- not even Thom Hartmann has dared so much as speculate how this actually came about. 

My own belief, based entirely on the body of circumstantial evidence provided by our own political history -- evidence that in any other circumstance would prove more than sufficient for conviction -- is that both the major parties were ruinously compromised by their collaboration in covering up the anti-New-Deal conspiracy that prompted the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963. In all probability,  this meticulously camouflaged coup was the lynch-pin -- pun intended -- of a multi-generation project that began with the overtly fascist Bankers' Plot of 1933-34. Its tyrannical purpose was unquestionably furthered by the gradual conversion of Christianity to the plutocrats' original Fifth Column (now effectively their sturmabteilung), a process of subversion that began in the 1930s, quite possibly -- given the thorough nazification of Seattle -- with guidance from Nazi Germany. It was almost certainly bolstered to omnipotence by the plutocrats' gleeful embrace of the unprecedented  capability for infinite evil obtained by the government's post-Stalingrad adoption of legions of Original Nazi war-criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms in a seductively propagandized, cleverly disguised and infinitely financed sequel to Hitler's campaign for world conquest. That something very much like this hypothesized scheming took place is  proven by the relentless reversal of every progressive gain we of the USian 99.9 Percent ever achieved. Significantly, the multi-decade campaign of nazification is as demonstrably bipartisan as the Banksters' original scheme:  note  the Democrats' collaboration with the Republican Nixon in what should be termed "the Powell-Memo affair" (scroll down for the "smoking gun"). Note too the patient, diabolical cunning of the campaign's revised  Mein Kampf methodology, the  subversion that destroyed the Weimar Republic in less than a decade slowed to a multi-generation regimen of psychological conditioning -- the one sure guarantee of nazification's unassailable permanence.  Only now -- and far too late -- is there a general awakening to  its irremediable destruction of our liberty, a process ever-more-obviously scripted to culminate in the ultimate Final Solution, the election of another Hitler. The intended result is obviously the conversion of the USian Empire to the de facto Fourth Reich, complete with global re-commencement of the German Nazis' Holocaust,¹ thus to ensure the eternal planetary supremacy of the Aryan (non-Semitic/non-Hispanic) Caucasian race and its sadistically misogynistic Christian theocracy.  

Though Hartmann deceptively ignores the Democrats' pivotal role in putting Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court, he does touch upon how the plutocratic conquest of the two parties begun by Powell and completed by Citizens United has transmogrified both parties (and thus all USian governance at every level)² into the capitalists' one-hundred-percent-reliable weapons of socioeconomic oppression. But Hartmann -- and as far as I know every other widely published USian journalist -- repeatedly refuses to scoop the world on what might well be the most telling expression of realpolitik in our national history: the (now undeniable) fact the two parties have themselves each become predatory capitalist corporations. Both are bastions of moral imbecility, their defiant betrayals of popular will proving them as indifferent to our well-being as the executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company are to global ecology and human survival or Union Carbide's executives were to the health of Bhopal residents.  Republicans and Democrats no longer compete to serve their constituents; they battle only to monopolize the spoils of governance, the wealth to be amassed through the full spectrum of unchecked individual and collaborative corruption,  an inconceivably obscene span of incalculable profiteering ranging from the clandestine malfeasance that tolerates Boeing's murderous abandonment of safety principles to the defiantly public bribery of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his Christonazi/Neoconfederate ilk.  In which context note the fact -- often repeated by Hartmann -- that Congress could readily outlaw all these outrages. Though here Hartmann also fails us all; he does so  by his refusal to report that Congress is now too incurably addicted to bribery to ever again prohibit the outrages by which our enslavement -- I say again enslavement -- is financed. 

__________________
¹That this carefully choreographed mass murder has already begun is irrefutably proven by the USian Empire's Post-World-War-II military history, specifically its ongoing series of wars and proxy-wars -- Iran, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia etc. (and no doubt eventually Israel/Palestine and the Ukraine too). These conflicts methodically destabilize the targeted realms, purposefully  reducing their populations to the eternally inescapable victimhood of perpetually fragmented,  irremediably deadly socioeconomic chaos -- the most plausibly deniable form of induced ecogenocide. The constant imposition of this ultimate form of  divide et imperā by our species' most cunning, most indomitably powerful imperial military reveals its clandestine intent. It also proves the USian ruling class -- especially since its post-Stalingrad reinforcement by war criminals who had been the direct disciples of Hitler -- was never the fumbling band of morons the rigidly conformist, self-defeatingly arrogant USian  left would have us suicidally believe. Contrary to the resultant misconceptions, we are ruled by the most evil-minded, diabolically skilled, technologically omnipotent, ecogenocidally ruthless cabal of tyrants in all human experience -- those who dare wage knowingly apocalyptic war against our Mother Earth herself and thereby jeopardize our species' very existence.

²Local, state and federal examples of methodical tyrannization include, respectively, the following: 
♦how the Tacoma city government does everything in its power to ensure occupants of rental dwellings remain ignorant of dramatically expanded tenants' rights;
♦how Chicago is prohibiting protest at this year's "Democratic" (sic) National Convention;
♦how Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Oklahoma -- each gerrymandered to permanent  Christonazi theocracy -- are combining drug-war laws with "fetal personhood" to radically expand the reproductive re-enslavement of women;
♦how the Texas war against immigrants has escalated to de facto secession;
♦how federal officials routinely dupe the voters by promising politically impossible humanitarian and environmental reforms;
♦how Obama's campaign slogan, "change we can believe in," was later proven the most brazen deception in U.S. presidential history, the reasons here, here and here I long ago dubbed him "Barack the Betrayer";
♦how the feds out-source their biological-warfare experiments, with U.S.-funded labs in both the Ukraine and the People's Republic of China now credibly exposed, the latter the primary focus of the increasingly bitter, ever-more-politicized dispute over the origin of the ongoing but ever-more-officially denied pandemic inflicted by the inexplicably fast mutation of the Covid virus. (See also "Lessons from the Great Covid Cover-Up," which the rigidly conformist USian left damns as rabid conspiracy theory, but which -- despite my infinite contempt for Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul in response to his fanatical embrace of Ayn Rand's disguised nazism -- I nevertheless regard as worthy of consideration.)     

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Relevant Contributions to Other Websites
AS I'VE SAID before, I am limiting re-publication of my comment-thread remarks to those I believe add new perspectives to the unprecedented horrors of our apocalyptic era. 

***

Kentucky Bill Aims to Criminalize Homelessness
These sorts of laws are increasingly popular everywhere in the U.S. Given the ecogenocidal bias of the Christonazi/Neoconfederate cabal that tyrannizes the U.S. via the Supreme Court, even the most murderous such measures are sure to be ruled constitutional. And once Trump is führer-for-life, there's no doubt the extermination of unsheltered people will become national policy. Socialist revolution is thus ever-more-obviously humanity's most essential survival measure.  

***

A Trumpite Triumph in 2024?*
Apparently Mr. Englehardt is having an exceptionally difficult time adjusting to the three irremediable realities of 2024: that we humanitarians have by our submissiveness allowed ourselves to be robbed -- permanently (that is, with no possibility of humanitarian restoration) -- of literally everything we ever managed to achieve; that by submission to patriarchy, we humans have doomed our species to extinction and our Mother Earth to reduction to a bug planet; and that by these two now-irreversibly apocalyptic failures, we humans have proven the notion of history exhibiting a "moral arc...that bends toward justice" to be the most ruinously deceptive Big Lie of all time. I empathize, of course. Hence I respectfully remind Mr. Englehardt the Kubler-Ross stages of dying are as applicable to human societies as they are to individual humans, which means he too will eventually reach the final stage of the process, which is often defined as "peaceful acceptance," but which in fact is the benumbed resignation to the inevitable that allows us to make productive use of whatever time we might have left.
__________________
*Yes I changed the original headline; “Trumpite” is more properly predatory than “Trumpian,” and Bacchus -- one of my favorite gods -- is most assuredly among the innumerable non-Abrahamic deities the fanatically Trumpite Christonazis ignorantly damn as incarnations of Satan.

***

Five Years Prison for Revealing How the Rich Avoid Taxation
That an official of the Biden Regime, Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri, applauds the conviction and (probably deadly) five year prison sentence imposed on whistle-blower Charles Littlejohn for revealing that our Masters are exempt from taxation is a "smoking gun" laying bare the terrible truth there is absolutely no economic difference between the "Democratic" (sic) Party and the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party it serves as a Fifth Column.

And this lack of economic difference -- this relentlessly support for the de facto restoration of slavery variously euphemized as "Reagonomics" or "neoliberalism" -- tells us there is ultimately no difference in the two parties' predatory intent. The apparent difference is therefore merely an illusion created by the parties' competing schedules: the Christonazi/Neoconfederats want immediate, shock-doctrine imposition of nazification, while the Democrats want to continue imposing it by the stealth of boiled-frog conditioning.

The ultimate smoking-gun of the Democrats' post-JFK transition to the Christonazi/Neoconfederate Fifth Column is of course the Powell Memo: Powell was a Democrat -- do the research -- and his appointment to SCOTUS by a Nixon-backing Democrat majority was the first post-JFK collaboration-for-nazification between the two parties.

Since then, the fact homelessness is skyrocketing far beyond its all-time high is merely the latest proof we the people of the 99.9 percent have been permanently reduced to absolute powerlessness.

***

Special Counsel Slams Biden’s “Limited” Memory
Let us not forget that Robert K. Hur is Trumpite, appointed by a "Democratic" (sic) Party that is in fact nothing more than the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. 

Thus it should surprise no one that Hur's report (intentionally) dooms Biden to certain defeat. 

Meanwhile the Democrats -- exactly like any other cabal of capitalists under attack for toxic products and environmental ruin -- have  of course already made it clear they will not replace their CEO (Biden) under any circumstances. Instead they will merely change their advertising. 

The Democrats'  destructive determination thus underscores the two most apocalyptic truths of present-day  USian political and socioeconomic reality. 

One of these fatal truths -- the looming climax of the slow extermination of any USian pretense of democracy -- is the ever-more-obvious extent to which the post-JFK Democrats serve as the Christonazi/Neocionfederate Fifth Column.  

The other fatal truth -- less obvious but ultimately far more deadly --  is the extent to which mainstream USian "politics" (sic) has been reduced to  a war between two corporate-owned de facto corporations  fighting over the spoils --i.e., the profits -- of governance; the well-being of the public be damned. Were it otherwise, the Sanders campaign would not have been methodically crushed (thus to enable Trump's 2016 victory), and Biden would have been replaced long ago.

Recognition of such colossal malfeasance makes our de facto enslavement undeniable. Too bad the combined seductions of trinket materialism, racism and the hatreds implicit in prosperity-gospel theocracy blind so many USians to the fact  socialism is obviously our only route to manumission. 

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Personal Deathwatch Update
THE MOST RECENT diagnostic tests inform me it is now a race between kidney failure and congestive heart failure to determine which will kill me first. As previously reported, my bout with Covid last summer radically worsened my hitherto-medication-stablized CHF,  intensifying a 10 percent loss of atrial-valve function to a 90 percent loss, so that now a mere walk of about 15 feet leaves me as short of breath as running 50 yards to catch a bus would have left me pre-Covid. And now -- ironically -- the massive increase in doses of diuretics necessitated by the Covid damage is destroying my kidneys. Thus it no longer matters I am denied the option of heart surgery by a mostly dormant but nevertheless incurable fungus  I brought home from Korea in 1962; even were there no fungus, my failing kidneys render any sort of cardiac repair pointless. In September my cardiologist told me I had at the most two years to live. The onset of kidney failure no doubt radically shortens that estimate, though thanks to our Masters' deliberately genocidal profiteering from reduction of   the national health-care staff, I will not know the magnitude of the revision until 5 June, which is the soonest I can see a nephrologist.

As I've said before, I find it metaphysically significant the three oracles I consulted at the beginning of the pandemic -- the I Ching, the Tarot and the Viking Runes -- all predicted Covid would kill me. Though by last year I was convinced the oracles had erred (or I had read them incorrectly), the aftermath of the disease proves they spoke the truth. Meanwhile my circumstances prove beyond dispute that vaccination against Covid -- I am vaccinated and four times boosted -- is ultimately no defense for elderly persons with other afflictions, a quality of the vaccines I cannot doubt is deliberate, in which context note the rapidly accumulating evidence of our Masters'  weaponization of Covid to exterminate a substantial portion of the 99.9 Percent.  Thus  Covid is added to all the other weapons in capitalism's arsenal for intentional but plausibly deniable genocide: homelessness, joblessness, health-care denials, welfare cutbacks, food-stamp reductions, environmental toxins, death-dealing flaws in products ranging from toys to aircraft, and let us not forget the potentially deadly anxiety inflicted by the ever-more-terrifying threat to Social Security and Medicare. In response to which,  the ever-deluded Moronic Majority predictably re-affirms its eternal subjugation by (again) cravenly submitting to our Masters' sadistic greed.  Fortunately though, an increasing number of activist-minded folks are at long last recognizing what we Marxians have always known:  that under capitalism -- particularly under its fanatically zero-tolerance Christonazi variant -- survival itself is revolutionary defiance.

Be assured I will  continue writing as long as  I can set fingers to keyboard.

LB/15 February 2024

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