Chris Hedges on the Moral Bankruptcy of Israeli Society

Israeli society cheers on the Gaza slaughterhouse and sees in genocide not a crime, but a utopian fantasy.

The Shared Mythological History of Israel and the US (w/ Joan Scott)

The Epstein Files Are Not Going Away | Explainer

I Never Thought I'd Miss these Days

 But, in this Summer of our discontent, I do miss them.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Trump?

                 I doubt it's Rupert Murdoch.

Jeffrey Epstein Is a Policy Issue

Jeffrey Epstein Is a Policy Issue: It’s about elite impunity, the defining issue in America for more than two decades.

MAGAt-in-Chief Betrays the MAGAt Minions

 

It’s so funny how Trump has stopped even pretending to be a populist. As soon as he was re-elected he was just “Yeah okay so Israel comes first and forget everything I said about free speech and the Ukraine war is continuing and there will be no Epstein investigation, fuck you.”

Politics 101

 

Mamdani Stands Tall

                 Why? Because he's smart and not craven.

Trump and that "Epstein Creep"

 Get your Trump edition of the Bible and read all about it.

The U.S. Government Is A Protection Racket

            RESIST. REFUSE. RENOUNCE.

Trump's Big Beautiful Bill

 

Will the MAGA-crowd continue to say, "Thank you, Sir! May I have another?" when they are experiencing the effects of this latest edition of Voodoo Economics? Transferring wealth from the middle and working classes to the 1% must have its limits, no? 

But when they are mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore, where will they turn? To the feckless and often loathsome Democrats? Therein lies the rub.

One Mamdani is not enough. And the hour is getting late. 

Zohran is the real MAGA

Our Mamdani Moment

Let us begin with the cultural forces that have shaped Donald Trump and his ilk.

Trump is a combination of two toxic tendencies that are as American as apple pie: the rapacious capitalism that resulted in the Virginia plantation (Jamestown, 1607) and the sanctimoniousness of the Massachusetts Bay settlement (Plymouth, 1630). 

Otherwise, as a humanoid (I won’t say “human being”), he is pretty much an empty suit. Deeply insecure, always crying for attention, it’s pretty clear he never received much in the way of love as a child. He surrounds himself with yes-men and yes-women until they stop telling him what he wants to hear about himself and then he shows them the door. 

My own disenchantment with the USA—as opposed to what Bruce Springsteen calls “the America we hold in our hearts”— began to take shape in law school. 

 

It was there that I was expected to accept as normal the disconnect between the story we tell about ourselves (e.g., “everyone is equal before the law,” “reason is enshrined in the law,” “judges are not politicians,” etc.) and what I witnessed in the cases I was assigned to read and the court proceedings I was assigned to observe. 

 

Try as I might, I could never stop minding the gap. This sent me back to studying philosophy, religion, history, and literature. I now find myself in the same boat, "Sailing After Lunch," with Wallace Stevens: "A most inappropriate man/In a most unpropitious place." But I digress...

The major media treat Trump as an aberration because, frankly, it’s embarrassing to accept how very American he really is. They also inflate him as some omnipotent evil genius: as such, he provides them with convenient cover for their own moral cowardice and complicity. Many weak-kneed Liberals ride that train to the same arse-covering destination, by the way. 

 

But there are the Zohrans among us who have no stake in maintaining the white supremacist status quo: thank you Lyndon Johnson for expanding immigration from Africa and Asia in 1965, and thank you Max Weber for teaching us that history is the record of unintended consequences. 

 

Moreover, Mamdani has no stake in the rich-get-richer-while-the-poor-get-poorer economy. The thing you always have to watch out for, of course, are the sell-outs (take Barack Obama, please). 

Zohran’s "Left pluralist” instead of Left or Right populist politics is Whitmanian at its core: Leaves of Grass is shockingly pluralist for its time (the “Left” part comes from Whitman’s devotion first to Andrew Jackson and then to Abraham Lincoln). As for the pluralism, well, Whitman told us himself: he was large; he contained multitudes. This, too, is America.

But now that Mamdani has caught the attention of the murderous white supremacist elite and its lackeys in the major media, we must keep him in our prayers. We know what happened to King, to Malcolm, to Medgar Evers, etc., etc., etc. 

 

To his everlasting credit, Zohran Mamdani has found the crack where the light gets in. May he rip it wide open…

This Is How the Great Satan Operates

 

Senator Loathesome

 

Netanyahu To Meet Trump at the White House on July 7, Marking His Third Visit of the Year

Netanyahu To Meet Trump at the White House on July 7, Marking His Third Visit of the Year: President Trump will meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday, July 7, marking the third time that he will host the Israeli leader this year. The upcoming visit comes in the wake of the 12-day US-Israeli war on Iran and amid Israel's ongoing genocidal war…