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The idea of “America” has been kidnapped by a malevolent force, and at this point, we don’t know how to get her back, or even if she’s still alive. We’re afraid and don’t know where to turn. We await the explanatory ransom note that never comes. Why did they do this? What do they want? For that matter, what do we want? It seems so long ago when things made sense out here in the desert. We pay attention to celebrity (displaced eros) and violence (repressed thanatos), especially through the images on our screens.
This story has commandeered all the channels of our attention, from MSNow to Fox News, equally. It’s the only story that brings us together. Even though nothing has happened in 12 days, we are obsessed with it, clinging to every morsel of evidence, every strand of a possible narrative.
Over 600,000 people are reported missing in the US every year. A child goes missing every 40 seconds. On the streets of our cities today, masked and heavily armed officials grab immigrants and protestors and carry them away in unmarked cars. Abduction (a crime involving depriving someone of liberty) has become a principal policy.
Trump is rapidly trying to buy or build a gulag of prison camps to hold up to 10,000 immigrant detainees apiece. The largest federal prison in the US today, the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida, only holds 7000 prisoners. ProjectSaltBox.substack.com tracks public records of the Department of Homeland Security and its sub-agencies, and DetentionReports.com provides transparency and a wealth of information about ICE detention facilities being built and purchased across the US. They’re currently tracking 237 ICE Detention Centers. The resistance is growing.
The functional abduction of children by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell is laid out in nauseating detail in 3.5 million pages of documents, including 180,000 images and 2000 videos. Reading through the emails sent by and to Epstein is a torturous wallow in the disgusting ways and means of the Epstein Class of rich people in power. The QAnon/MAGA conspiracy theorists were right about the direction and depravity of the Epstein Class; they were just too narrow in their focus. The Trump-Epstein Class is now in power, and they have no intention of giving it up.
The only remedy for this in a democracy is the vote. Steve Bannon made it clear what Trump means when he talks about “nationalizing” elections in cities and states that did not vote for him, when Bannon said on February 5th: “If we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November, we’re not going to let you steal the country again.” And “Let’s put you on notice again: ICE is going to be around the polls in the 2026 midterm election.”
Since the Supreme Court has given Trump hegemony in anything having to do with foreign affairs, Trump is claiming that the 2020 election was rigged against him by foreign governments. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s team has seized voting machines and data in Puerto Rico, looking to prove that Venezuela, under the guidance of Nicolás Maduro, hacked the voting machines there in 2020 in favor of Biden/Harris. It’s thought that Trump might now force Maduro, a prisoner in the US, to sign on to this lie in return for some measure of clemency or at least comfort.
Kash Patel’s FBI has sent out orders to state election officials from every state to attend a briefing on “preparations for the midterms” on February 25th.
Meanwhile, the oligarchical destruction of the news media is accelerating. The quisling billionaire Jeff Bezos has killed the Washington Post, claiming the need for cost-cutting, while his own personal fortune has increased by $70 million a day so far this year. Bezos only paid $250 million to buy the Post from the Graham family in 2013. He can replace that amount in three or four days of passively accumulating wealth. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was adopted as the official slogan of The Washington Post in February 2017, and now appears to have been a prophetic business plan on Bezos’s part.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.