The Horror of Amerika

Who Needs Dystopian Politiucal Science Fiction at 90 Seconds to Midnight?

Guns, Killer Cops, and Race

The lethal madness of fascitizing capitalist-imperialist Amerika, unaddressed and denied, facing no serious acknowledgement and confrontation, deepens.

A six-year-old shoots his first-grade teacher with a Glock pistol after school administrators ignored reports that he was packing at school.

A diaper-wearing toddler is caught on video waving a loaded gun around.

The country undergoes 43 mass shootings in its first month, only slightly more than usual, on pace for 516 this year. The gun slaughters, commonly carried out with military-style assault rifles, are now routine in a nation where a fascist organization, the National Rifle Association, has helped make sure that there are many more guns than people.

The Los Angeles Police kill three young men, two Black and one Latino, within one week in January.  Georgia gendarmes kill a young Latino activist trying to stop the police state from turning a big swath of Atlanta-area forest land into a police terror training camp.  

Five or more Memphis police officers are caught on video sadistically and fatally beating the 29-year-old Black man Tyre Nichols just two blocs from his mother’s house.

The American police state normally kill more than 1100 people each year.  Blacks are 3 times more likely to be killed by police than whites, 25 times more likely in Chicago and 28 times more likely in Minneapolis.

The FOX News right uses Nichols’ death at the hands of Black officers to absurdly absolve white anti-Black racism of any responsibility for Blacks’ subordinate and terrorized position in the US even though (a) the preponderant majority of police killings involve white cops and (b) Black cops function very much within the institutional and political framework of racist mass incarcerationist white supremacy.

Fascist Maniacs on the Loose and Running for President

Meanwhile, a malignant fascist maniac who held the White House for four years and who tried to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and rule of law after he lost the 2020 presidential election – Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump – is still free to spread white Amerikaner hate and sheer stupidity with Secret Service protection.  This repellent stain upon humanity is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. The preponderant majority of his party’s base believes his Goebbels-worthy lie that the last presidential election was stolen. A considerable portion of that very predominantly white Amerikaner cohort backs the use of violence to “take our country back” in the name of preserving “our traditional European values.”   

The wannabe fascst strongman Trump’s main and sole serious competition for the 2024 GOP POTUS nomination is the arguably more dangerous and insidious Republi-fascist Florida governor Ron DeSantis. The resoundingly re-elected mini-Mussolini DeSantis walks free after kidnapping Venezuelan asylum seekers in Texas and dumping them in Martha’s Vineyard to make a political statement against “the left” last year. Under Herr DeSantis’ command, the fascist state of Florida is banning books and high school courses that tell basic factual truths about Native American genocide, Black chattel slavery, Jim Crow racial terrorism, and racial oppression more broadly. 

Along with his attempted erasure of Native American and Black historical experience, DeSantis wants to monitor the menstrual cycles of the state’s female high school athletes as part of his related wars on transgendered youth and abortion rights.

His fascist statecraft also includes the introduction of an annual “Crimes of Communism” day in Florida schools and the passage of a bill that bans reference to gayness and transgender experience in those schools.

Imagine Germany Banning Teaching the History of the Nazi Party and the Third Reich

The accurate teaching of American history and social science is under attack across the nation’s so-called red states, which would better be termed brown states (to connote the brownshirts worn by Hitler’s enforcers). The following states have banned supposedly radical Left “critical race theory” (CRT) so far: Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Bans are moving forward in the legislatures of Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana,  Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Just to be clear, the “CRT” bans in place and on the way criminalize the honest and serious classroom discussion and reading on the reality and consequences of Native American genocide, Black chattel slavery, Jim Crow racial terrorism, residential red-lining, residential and educational segregation, racist voter suppression, racially discriminatory hiring, racially disparate mass incarceration and felony branding, and the massive racial wealth and power gap – racism deeply understood – in the United States past and present. Many if not most of the “anti-CRT” bills in place and in formation also restrict accurate and serious teaching on sexism, feminism, gay and transgender experience, and LGBT rights.  

In numerous school districts across the nation’s vast disproportionately white reactionary sections, books seen as violating Christian white nationalist and patriarchal values are being taken off school and public library shelves by ideological censors. How long until full on Amerikanber book burnings in US public squares?

Imagine if you will whole regions of Germany forbidding the honest and serious teaching of the history of the rise of the Nazi Party, the Third Reich, and the Nazi Holocaust.

Who needs dystopian political science fiction like Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, The Handmaids’ Tale, and 1984 when you have the real thing in Iowa, Florida, and numerous other states under demented Amerikaner control.

The Insurrectionist House

Meanwhile the corporate media is normalizing the fascist takeover of the US House of Representatives by a post-republican “Republican” party that has elevated far-right election-denying fanatics like Marjorie Q-Curious Taylor-Greene and Jim Jordan to top committee positions. The new radical insurrectionist House, labelled “conservative” on the “P”BS Newshour, is absurdly treating the previous House’s painstakingly detailed investigation of Trump’s attempted fascist coup as an example of “the radical left-wing weaponization of the federal government.”  The new putschist House is holding the normally standard raising of the debt ceiling – required for the federal government to pay for expenditures already made – hostage to absurdly accuse the neoliberal Democrats of out-of-control leftist social spending and to cut into basic social programs including, you know, Medicare and Social Security.  They have falsely accused the brilliant Black Somali-American female Congressperson Ilhan Omar of “antisemitism” to justify their blatantly bigoted racist, sexist, and  religiously chauvinist expulsion of her from the House Foreign Relations Committee.  Their main job is to function as a wrecking crew, helping cripple the Marxist-Leninist Joe Biden presidency and his Trotskyist allies like Senate Proletarian Majority Leader Charles Schumer to grease the skids for Republi-fascist triumph in 2024-25.

The Horror of Fascism Beneath the “Horrors of Socialism” Resolution

A Florida fascist in the House recently sparked the lower chamber of Congress to pass a preposterous neofascist House resolution denouncing “the horrors of socialism.” The measure apparently applies to everything from Pol Pot and Stalin’s mass murders to social-democratic day-care in Norway and the tepid leftish Democratic Socialists of America. Along with so much else, this measure should lead US-Americans to reflect on the horrors of fascism. The resolution is meant to absurdly paint out the neoliberal and bourgeois Democratic Party as “socialist,” “communist,” and “Marxist” so as set up the not-so leftmost of the nation’s two dominant capitalist parties for elimination. The goals is to clear the path for single party white Christian nationalist rule down the near-term road. A key fascist calling card is an obsessive hatred of Marxism and socialism combined with the false conflation of centrists and liberals with supposedly evil Marxism/socialism. The conflation is meant to facilitate the evisceration of all political opposition.  The main target is the other capitalist party. It’s all about sheer power, which is why the open fraud George Santos still sits in the US House, why the neo-Nazi Talyor-Greene is now a big Congressional and party player, and why the Republican National Committee has declared the January 6^th Capitol Riot “legitimate political discourse.”

Never mind, of course, that the nation and the world are in dire need of the radical introduction of socialism to overcome the officially unmentionable exterminist horrors of capitalism, which include the significantly elevated generation of potentially nuclear inter-imperialist war and the turning of the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas chamber – crimes that would have horrified even Hitler and that dwarf anything that can be laid at the feet of Stalin or Pol Pot.   

Ninety Seconds to Midnight

Speaking of World War III, ecocide, and a nation and world tipping into sheer madness, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently – oh by the way – pushed its Doomsday Clock to its greater indication of peril ever: 90 seconds to Midnight.  Let that sink in. The main reason for this chilling step is the inter-imperialist Ukraine War, which may have killed at least 200,000 human beings in less than one year.  Besides bringing us closer to a nuclear exchange than any moment in recent memory, the conflict is directly and indirectly exacerbating the existential climate catastrophe that is the natural result of carbon-addicted and US-led global capitalism’s ongoing project of cancelling all hope for a livable future.

Sleeping Car Joe and the Dismal, Disingenuous, Dollar-Drenched Dems

The dismal, dollar-drenched Dems, the party of “inauthentic opposition” to corporate rule and fascist creep, are deeply complicit (and worse) in all of this insanity. Well more than half the Democratic House Caucus – 109 representatives – voted for the neo-fascist  “horrors of socialism” resolution. The Dems have long played along with the false antisemitism-baiting of Ilhan Omar because she has dared to occasionally criticize the Judeo-fascist apartheid state of Israel.

The Democrats’ supposedly liberal president Joe “Sleeping Car” Biden concluded 2022 by pre-emptively breaking a planned and overdue strike by badly overworked rail workers. He joined with his “friends” in the other major capitalist party to pass a budget bill that rolled back a tax credit that reduced poverty for millions of working families – this in a nation so savagely unequal that the top 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The decrepit corporatist and arch-imperialist Biden will soon announce the end of the Covid-19 public health emergency, slashing key pandemic protection as the virus flourishes and undergoes deadly new mutations around the world.  

Biden is so cynical a bastard as to have “promised” that he would sign a bill codifying women’s right to an abortion as national law if his party kept Congress in the 2022 mid-terms.  As he knew very well when he said this, it would have made no difference had the Democrats retained the House – they didn’t (how ‘bout that “Roevember”?!) – because the bill Biden pledged to sign would have required receive 60 votes in the Senate. As Biden, a longtime US Senator, was fully aware, that was a complete impossibility in the absurdly powerful and badly malapportioned upper chamber, where the nation’s most reactionary regions and states are grossly overrepresented. (In the same sick vein, Biden and the Democrats know the currently existing Senate will never pass a serious police reform bill even as they just followed Tyre Nichols’ murder by fanning false hope for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which the Senate already shot down when it came out of a Democratic Party-controlled House in February of 2021. But that’s the depressing and disingenuous Clinton-Obama-Pelosi-Biden Dems: more hopey-changey bullshit meant to keep the masses demobilized, depressed, dreamy, and off the streets.)

Biden’s claims of concern for women and girls targeted by the Christian fascist women-hating war on abortion – a war opposed by two-thirds of the nation – are blatantly disingenuous.  He could have immediately responded to the Dobbs v. Jackson decision last June by immediately declaring the attack on abortion rights a public health emergency and making safe and legal abortions available on federal lands across the entire nation. He did no such thing as he and his party welcomed the fascist Handmaid ruling as a tool to limit their losses in the mid-term “Roevember” elections. Biden’s party and its NGO “choice” allies have cynically surrendered to and electorally exploited the Republic-fascist project of turning abortion policy back to the states, half of which now enforce abortion bans. That’s a cold-blooded betrayal of millions of women and girls in prohibition states.

Here it should be noted that the Republi-fascists are not satisfied with state-level victories for the Christian-fascist women-enslaving doctrine of fetal personhood. They aim for a national abortion ban, something they may well be positioned to impose by taking back the Senate and the White House in 2024-25.

This very week, moreover, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas is poised to impose a de facto national ban on many medical abortions by prohibiting the use of the critical abortion drug mifepristone. So much for going along with “taking the abortion struggle to the state level” (Planned Parenthood).  

The hollow resistance Democrats, the nation’s party of “inauthentic opposition” (Sheldon Wolin) to corporate rule and neofascist takeover, stand at the very least a coin-toss chance of losing the White House to Trump or DeSantis in 2024. The bumbling, charisma-challenged neoliberal warmonger Biden’s popularity is incredibly low, thanks in no small part to his longtime and ongoing allegiance to the rich and powerful, to whom he made a non-disingenuous campaign promise in 2019: “Nothing would fundamentally change” when he became president.

Speaking of the judiciary and presidential elections, the Trumpmaiden Supreme Court has recently and menacingly heard arguments for the far-right “independent state legislature theory” in Moore v. Harper, a case that could open the constitutional door for red state legislatures to cancel popular presidential votes that don’t go the right/white Christian nationalist way in 2024-25 . Never minds that the right-tilted and undemocratic Electoral College has already long tilted presidential election outcomes well to the starboard side. As if this isn’t bad enough, the line-up of Senate races due for election contests in 2024 strongly favors the fascist major party, raising the real specter of full/ triple-branch Republikaner hegemony atop the federal government. 

Dancing to “Armageddon”

So what if such an alignment is contrary to majority public political, policy, and societal opinion in the United States.  This is not a democracy.  It’s a corporate-imperial plutocracy functioning within the anti-democratic straight-jacket of an aristo-republican 18th Century charter written by and for militantly propertarian slaveowners, landed gentry,  and merchant capitalists for whom democracy — popular sovereignty — was the ultimate nightmare.

Meanwhile, the former Iraq Invasion cheerleader Biden is recklessly pouring significant imperial resources into a catastrophic Eastern European proxy war with the nuke-wielding fascist-imperialist Vladimir Putin. The Biden administration and Pentagon are engaged in a sick death dance with Moscow and Ukraine. The ante of escalation keeps getting pushed up to a point where the conflict threatens to take on a life of its own and spill disastrously out of control. Zelensky wants Patriot missiles.  The White House resists and then gives in; Moscow issues another of its supposedly “empty” (Zelensky worshippers say) nuclear threats and calls up more conscripts.  Zelensky wants Abrams tanks.  Biden resists and then gives in; Putin calls up 500,000 troops.

Every US/NATO-enabled Ukrainian victory brings us closer to doomsday. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a close Putin ally, recently warned NATO that prospective Russian defeat in Ukraine could lead to nuclear war. "The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war may trigger a nuclear war," Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's security council, said on Telegram. "Nuclear powers have never lost major conflicts on which their fate depends."

Biden himself says we may be looking at Armageddon. He, Zelensky, and Putin are starting to remind me and others of Dr. Strangelove and Major Kong.

Up, Up, and Away: the Hot Air of Manufacturing Consent Reaches a New Low

And, as if all this isn’t insane and dangerous enough, we have just witnessed the preposterous inflation of an errant Chinese weather balloon into a supposed dastardly high-tech spy mission meant to give Beijing data on US-American military capacities.  What propgandistic madness. As an unusually well-informed historian writes me this:

“The Chinese WEATHER balloon---full, supposedly of heavy equipment for war purposes, flew over the US, doing scientific experimentation. I seriously doubt it is a spy balloon; why in the world would the Chinese use it when they have satellites that are more accurate. This is the worst and potentially most dangerous media freakout since the imaginary weapons of mass destruction, when Colin Powell told the world, with a straight face, that plumbing pipes proved the Iraqis had such weapons (when all the right-wing inspectors, who actually knew something, denied it--and could find only, if I recall right, one media outlet, In These Times.)  I have no truck with the People’s Republic of China’s actions in Xingjang or their imperialist behavior in their belt and road initiative, but this is about foreign policy. I have been astonished by Chinese restraint: we have tried to muck around in their internal affairs (if we believe the media, the Chinese are enslaving a million or so in Xinjiang, in proportional terms, fewer than our enslaved prisoners, forced to work for less than a dollar a day); have tried to destroy their economy and most profitable corporations (I wonder what the US would do if the PRC demanded that no country buy, say, Apple or GM or Microsoft products); and tried to [militarily] surround them. China is acting like a regional hegemon, which it is, and doing in their neighborhood, what the US does all over the world.”   

Bulls eye! There was no way for the Chinese military to direct the windblown path of their under-inflated weather balloon, which wandered aimlessly across the US until it was melodramatically shot-down in a ridiculous Chomskyean war media spectacle by a US fighter jet off the Southeast US coast. Will the pilot(s) who slayed the evil Chinese “spy” balloon be parachuted onto the stage of next weekend’s Super Bowl halftime show, adding some Huxley and Postman to the Orwell of it all?!

Beneath this bizarre new depth in the attempted manufacture of mass consent to the US imperial agenda lay the real goal: softening up the US populace for a coming US war with China over Taiwan and for doing what it and Russia does and what the US does on a planetary scale: “acting like a regional hegemon.”

Biden’s also another goal in ordering the televised top gun attack on the inflatable Chi-com spyship over the Atlantic: to not look too soft as the Republi-fascist Party went apeshit with Trumpian-Bannon-esque China-hate over the Red incursion.

Dystopia Now

Shit has gotten freaky when the Empire's running dog media can run a war prep propaganda op like what they just did with a wayward meteorological device – an incredibly dangerous and far from comic episode.

Smiling Joe Biden, who has overseen considerably more oil and gas drilling than his far more openly eco-cidal predecessor, has had a happy and “full” wealth- and power-serving life for the most part, great personal tragedies aside.  He can look back on eight-plus decades on a planet he is helping push towards what he all too cavalierly calls “Armageddon.” After Herr Trump or Herr DeSantis defeats him with or without help from the Electoral College and/or the independent state legislature theory (possibly upheld by the democracy-Trumping Supremes’ coming Moore v. Harper ruling), he can be counted on to dutifully and peacefully hand over power to his “friends” in a party ruled by folks he once daringly and semi-accurately described as “semi-fascist.” He will politely attend the re-inauguration of Trump or DeSantis on January 20, 2025. With control of both houses of Congress, the high Handmaid Court, the White House and half or more of the state governments, and of the heavily armed white cops in the nation’s blue cities, the Republi-fascists can take damn near full single-party Christian white nationalist control of the country, banning the “China-Sponsored Marxist Woke Radical Left Democrats” and validating the decision of a Hong Kong democracy protester who recently told me that they’ll take their chances living under the authoritarian rule of fake-communist state capitalist China over migrating to reside with family in the USA – the glorious City on a Hill full of fascists who are grossly overrepresented in the halls of power.   

Who needs dystopian science fiction in this brave new world?