Military leaders don’t like the current Secretary of Defense. They consider him a pseudo-masculine poseur and an unqualified loose cannon on deck. Hegseth has fired a lot of military leaders since becoming secretary.

The Pentagon has been using an artificial intelligence system called Project Maven, developed by Palantir and incorporating the AI model Claude from Anthropic to speed up the “kill chain” to identify, approve, and strike targets faster. It appears that this system might have been used in the US strike on the girls’ school in Minab that killed 175 on February 28.

The Federal Reserve reported that, in the last six months, there have been zero new jobs created in the private sector. Two million Americans have lost their health insurance and millions more have seen their insurance rates soar.

Trump has an extraordinary ability to make masses of people believe things that aren’t true. It is part of our terrible fate that the Trump phenomenon is occurring at the precise moment when hard decisions need to be made about our future with Artificial Intelligence.

Marilyn Thompson and Mitchell Black of The Post and Courier newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina have done a lot of old-fashioned investigative reporting on the contents of the 2019 interviews of the woman who claimed that she was sexually assaulted and beaten by Donald Trump in 1984, when she was 13 years old.

On March 14, Trump posted on Truth Social a list under the heading, “President Trump Is Reshaping the Media,” with three sections: GONE, REFORMS, and WINNING.

William Burroughs wrote about “Control” as an entity that must be engaged and vanquished, or at least contested. Burroughs’ sense of “Control” was as a parasitic system of power that works through the virus of language, mass media, bureaucratic structures, and technology. He was a devotee of Wilhelm Reich, who devised actual techniques for psychologically subverting Control.

Collecting, sorting, and storing massive amounts of data has long been the work of the Information Age, but these activities are now going into a quantum stage that could have a disproportionate, some say catastrophic, impact on the physical plane. 

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.

In the final hours of the Republican National Convention in 2024, they broke out the “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW” signs. Stephen Miller and Tom Homan had orchestrated family separations in the first Trump term, and now they wanted to go to the next level.

When Trump first came down the golden escalator to run for President in 2015, he began his appeal to voters by denigrating immigrants: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . .

After months and months of delay by Mike Johnson, Congress finally passed a law—H.R. 4405, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, on November 19—directing Trump’s Justice Department to release all the files they hold by December 19.

The mass deportations carried out by ICE are the actions of a deranged gang of xenophobes who are blaming immigrants for all the ills of modern American society. This is what tyrants have always done, on the way to authoritarianism for all.

Are you going to believe us or your lying eyes? When masked ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good at point blank range on January 7, he had been recording the moments before his shot on his own cellphone, and JD Vance thought that releasing Ross’s own video recording on January 9 would justify Ross’s action for Americans who saw it. It did not do that. 

Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of Indivisible, told Michelle Goldberg of the Times that while Trump “has been able to do extraordinary damage that will have generational effects, he has not successfully consolidated power.

Trump and MAGA hit the ground running in January 2025, and accomplished a tremendous amount in the first nine months of Trump’s second term, in terms of dismantling the government.

From the beginning of the rise of Trump, I have marveled at his support among farmers. This steadfast support is so incongruous that it continues to baffle me. In contrast to farmers’ nature, Trump is arrogant, mean, cruel, insecure, faithless, and narcissistic.

In a December 2nd Washington Post column titled “A Sickening Moral Slum of an Administration,” conservative columnist George Will wrote, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal without a war. An interesting achievement.”

In Trumpworld, the Culture Wars are seen as a long Cold War period in which the Right lost almost every battle, and they now want to turn it into a hot war.

Trump is wrecking American democracy and it appears that the legal, educational, and media institutions in the US are, so far, incapable of stopping him.

There has been a lot of speculation about how the presidential bunker under the now-demolished East Wing of the White House is figuring into the plans for Trump’s massive “ballroom.”

Tom Nichols, writing in The Atlantic on October 7, reminds us that an authoritarian takeover of a democratic country “must control three sources of power: the intelligence agencies, the justice system, and the military.”

Trump’s speech is a clear announcement of his intention to use the US military against his political opposition in US cities under Democratic, especially Black, leadership.

Trump is building an authoritarian regime in the US even more rapidly than Viktor Orban did in Hungary, although Trump and Stephen Miller and Robert Vought are working from the same playbook as Orban.

The leaders of the AI boom want you to think this is a wonderful thing for the world, but it’s already looking bad and we haven’t even gotten to the stage where the machines are more intelligent than humans. These AI entrepreneurs all have a quasi-religious belief in AGI and its power to transform the world and solve all our problems. They believe in AI as an Everything Machine.

Trump and his minions have all become unconscious surrealists, using meta messages, subtexts and subterfuge, pretexts and prevarications to subvert the meanings of words and images.

We know that Tyler Robinson’s family are all long-time Republicans and that Tyler thought his father became more “diehard MAGA” after Trump was elected the second time.

When Donald Trump traveled to England this month to avoid questions about the Epstein Files, he was met with images from the Epstein conspiracy projected onto Windsor Castle and unfurled on the great lawn.

I have a deep-seated abhorrence for the kind of elitism exemplified by the lives of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The features of this elitism came through loud and clear in Todd Blanche’s fawning, disgraceful “proffer” with Maxwell in July.

In a recent Instagram post, Michael Wolff (author of the 2018 book Fire and Fury: inside the Trump White House) said that Steve Bannon met Jeffrey Epstein in December 2018 and the two were inseparable from that time until Epstein’s death on August 10, 2019.

“May every day be another wonderful secret,” wrote Trump in Jeffrey Epstein’s 50^th birthday book in 2003, and they both had many days of secrets to come, and a significant portion of them were spent together.

“What is it about Jeffrey Epstein that’s so infuriating to people?” asked Tucker Carlson last Friday. “So infuriating that it’s actually causing seismic political problems? It’s the frustration of normal people, watching a certain class of people get away with everything every single time.”

When Colbert pointed out that everything Harris predicted during the presidential campaign about what would happen if Trump was elected has happened, and asked if any of it has surprised her, she replied, “I didn’t predict the capitulation.” And she said, “It’s on all of our shoulders, now.”

The 3.5% rule says that no government has withstood a challenge of 3.5% of their population standing up against them during a peak event. 3.5% of the US population of 342 million is about 12 million. The Women’s March against Trump on January 21, 2017 drew over 4 million people in hundreds of locations. So to actually stop Trump, we’ll need to get double or triple that number into the streets at one time.

The dog days of the Trump autocracy have been marked by the cowardice and rapid collapse of the leadership class in the US. This abject spinelessness in the leadership of elite universities, law firms, media companies, tech companies, and other private corporations has been chilling, but it has been offset by the courage of ordinary people standing up. 

Over five million people demonstrated against the Trump regime on June 14, dubbed “No Kings Day,” in more than 2100 cities and towns across America. These demonstrations were effective, I think, in their demeanor.

The importance of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the mayoral primary in New York should not be underestimated. He got 545, 334 votes in three rounds of ranked choice voting, to beat the Andrew Cuomo machine by 12 points. That means he got more votes than 27 current US senators received in their respective state elections. Yes, New York City is not like the rest of the US, but this may still be one of the most impressive wins for a leftist candidate in US history.

Elon Musk has said, “without me, Trump would have lost the election.” In other words, “I bought this presidency,” and have now discovered I purchased a defective product. This statement is true in one sense, but it conceals a great deal more than it reveals.

The ongoing revelation of the MAGA Data Theft has reached a new level with the recent reporting of President Trump engaging the services of big data analytics company Palantir Technologies to build a vast federal data platform to connect millions of Americans’ private records under a powerful AI system.

To see an autocrat in full flower, you have to see him in the midst of ordering a violent attack. An autocrat can’t resist that. Giving the order to release the death machines is the only thing that temporarily fills the void within them, the only thing that definitively confirms their power over others, even over life and death.

The ugly break-up of the Trump/Musk bromance was inevitable, but the considerable political consequences are still uncertain. Certainly, the uneasy alliance between MAGA-authoritarianism and techno-authoritarianism is shaken by the break.

The Trump regime’s march toward an authoritarian police state has been purposeful and relentless over the first five months of Trump’s second term, and the response by most of the media and most of the American public to this takeover has been maddeningly tepid.

The Mayor of Newark was arrested by ICE officials on Friday afternoon. Mayor Ras Baraka was with three members of Congress from New Jersey—Representatives Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez, and LaMonica McIver—who had come to inspect the new ICE detention center in Newark in their designated role of congressional oversight.

Trump is claiming an immediate emergency in the form of an “invasion” of the US by malign foreign migrants, requiring the setting aside of due process. This is what the Supreme Court is currently dealing with. But there are more and more indications that Trump does not intend this state of exception to be temporary.

Something extraordinary is happening in the Balkans, with students leading massive protests that the Vučić government doesn’t dare attack directly.

Donald Trump’s disgraceful mugging of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in a made-for-TV set-up in the Oval Office on May 21 was inspired by his previous ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 28.

It has become increasingly clear that the purpose of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency never had anything to with efficiency or ferreting out “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government spending. Instead, its goal has been to collect massive amounts of personal information on US residents.

As Trump, Musk, and numerous other Big Tech entrepreneurs involved in AI visited Saudi Arabia, it became clear that the Saudis want to control AI, and are one of the biggest investors in AI, worldwide.

Carceral porn reached a new level of depravity on March 26, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (aka ICE Barbie) channeled Kafka in the penal colony and Lynndie England at Abu Ghraib and shook her ass in front of rows of caged, bare-breasted tattooed prisoners in El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

Trump’s ridiculous tariff plan, based on non-existent facts and nonsense equations, has caused markets here and abroad to crater. The S&P 500 wiped out $5 trillion in wealth in two days.

Something shifted in America on April 1. If you were listening closely, you might have heard it move. 

What is DOGE going to do with all the sensitive data they are exfiltrating (stealing) from the databases of the government (and some non-government) agencies they have infiltrated over the past two months, ostensibly to “audit” them, to “increase efficiency”? Is this hoovering up of data in fact the real purpose of DOGE? And if so, to what end? A recent development in the DOGE saga may eventually provide some answers.

On March 21, Columbia’s trustees conceded to Trump’s demands in light of his threat to withhold $400 million in federal funds from the university.

US stock markets are falling like a stone, because of the trade wars driven by Trump’s excessive tariffs on our two contiguous neighbors, one of which he is threatening to annex as a 51^st state. The S&P 500 lost $4 trillion in market value. Nasdaq just had its worst day since September 2022.

The American people are split on some of Trump’s domestic policies, but they are not at all split on Trump’s policy toward Putin’s Russia and Ukraine.

Dr. Joanne Liu, a Canadian pediatric emergency medicine physician, Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Montreal, and the former international president of Médicins sans frontières/Doctors Without Borders, was invited to give a scientific lecture at New York University, where Dr. Liu had completed her fellowship specializing in pediatric emergency medicine in the 1990s. 

The Signalgate scandal continues to unfold and enfold the entire Trump administration, but Timothy Snyder has made a novel argument for its underlying meaning. First, he asked, why is the Trump cabinet using Signal?

These images appeared almost exactly eight years apart in time. Time magazine put Steve Bannon on its cover on February 13, 2017, and will put Elon Musk on the cover February 24, 2025. The headline of the Bannon story inside in 2017 was, “Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?” and “President Bannon” jokes proliferated.

What “cards” does Vladimir Putin have on Donald Trump? And what else could possibly explain the disgraceful actions of Trump and JD Vance toward our besieged ally, President Zelensky of Ukraine, while he was on a state visit to the Oval Office on Friday?

It turns out that Trump’s blitzkrieg of extreme actions in the first month of his second term is not at all popular with the American people. A number of polls that have come out in the past week all agree on this. In most of these polls, Trump is now six points underwater in favorability, which is fifteen points under any other president in history at the beginning of their terms.

The President’s boyfriend now has control of the US government’s checkbook and has access to millions of US citizens’ private information, including, most probably, your Social Security number. On February 1, Musk’s team took over control of the US Treasury’s payment system (which handles $6 trillion each year), including all the financial information of Americans and American businesses contained in this system.

Seventy-seven million Americans voted for Donald Trump for President in the last election, but more people than that voted for someone other than Trump. And right now, a sizable majority of Americans say they do not want to live under the control of his authoritarian regime.

Elon Musk and his DOGE minions have now gained access to highly sensitive personal data belonging to millions of Americans that is held in trust by the Social Security Administration, causing the top official at the SSA to quit her job rather than comply with DOGE demands.

The rapid and widespread cruelty of Trump’s moves on January 27—shutting down Head Start, the nutrition program for mothers and infants, veterans’ homeless shelters, nursing homes for seniors, small business loans, domestic violence shelters, Medicaid patients’ medicines (80 million Americans depend on Medicaid), police and firefighters, farm aid, school meals, home heating assistance, landmine clearance, cancer research, etc., was breathtaking.

Who knew that the nastiest family squabble around the Christmas table this year would erupt within Trumpworld, between the MAGA and DOGE factions? The flashpoint was Trump’s announcement on December 22nd of his choice of Elon Musk associate Sriram Krishnan, who was born in India and wants to remove the cap on green cards for workers from selected countries, to be Trump’s Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence.

Tech bro billionaires have gotten the message they need to get onboard the Trump Train as quickly as they can or risk being left behind and missing the lucrative ride ahead.

I’ve known George Gittoes for twenty years, since Leon Golub first introduced us in 2004. Leon was a big fan of George’s films, including his Soundtrack to War, part of which was included in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11. Gittoes is an Australian artist and filmmaker who has worked in conflict zones around the world for four decades, in Cambodia, Nicaragua, Congo, South Africa, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Tibet, and Mozambique. With his partner, the actor, singer and musician Hellen Rose, they have most recently lived and worked extensively in Afghanistan and Ukraine.

In an interview with Corriere della Sera, the most widely read newspaper in Italy, last week, Steve Bannon called Elon Musk “a truly evil person,” and vowed that he will “get Elon Musk kicked out” by the time Trump is inaugurated on January 20, by taking away Musk’s access to the White House. 

Today we were treated to  a spectacle both insidious and overwhelming. The spectacle was intended to make you disoriented and despairing. The intention was to make you stop thinking and acting. 

When I hear President-elect Trump talk about the accomplishments of his first term in office, I’m reminded of something the eighth US President, Martin Van Buren, said: “It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn’t.” Trump spends an inordinate amount of time and extraordinary effort explaining why he didn’t do the job right the first time, in regard to the economy, the pandemic, and virtually everything else he encountered in his first term.

How will the mainstream media respond to the assault on reality of the second Trump presidency? Early indications are not encouraging. Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press on December 9 was a test of just how journalists will deal with an autocrat who insists on repeating falsehoods that have been thoroughly debunked.

Steve Bannon’s pledge to get rid of Elon Musk before the Inauguration and make sure he isn’t given direct access to the West Wing in the White House has failed. Musk is setting up an office in the West Wing right now, and has been given full access to the president.

The Green Beret who blew up a Tesla Cybertruck and shot himself in front of the Trump International hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day left a series of suicide notes on a badly burned cellphone that police recovered from the vehicle. In these notes, he stated that it was his intention to send America a “wake-up call” with his action, because he felt that the country was “headed toward collapse.” He explained that he pulled this “stunt with fireworks and explosives” because “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence.”

Do you feel it? Everything has slowed down and gotten quiet. All the yelling and screaming has subsided for a bit. The images are coming up more slowly and further apart, the colors are a little brighter, and the patterns are more insistent. Groucho Marx comes onscreen and says “Everybody out there—everybody, no matter who you are, get out and vote no.”

History is the hedge against the current Age of Amnesia. In Trump’s first term in office, at least six of his cabinet officials were tied up in corruption scandals and, in some cases, criminal investigations, and four of them were forced out of office in disgrace.

In the end, as always, it was the people who didn’t vote who decided this election and gave us our first openly authoritarian ruler. Only 63% of eligible voters went to the polls this time, and Trump got just over half of those to vote for him. Trump actually got fewer votes than he did when he ran before, and Kamala Harris got more votes than Barack Obama did in 2008 or 2012. But 11 million Democrats didn’t bother to vote, and that did it.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

So the MAGA base represents about 5% of the total population of 335 million. And 23% of the total population voted for Trump in the general. A total of 155 million people voted in this election (this will probably rise to 158 million when all the ballots are finally counted), and Trump got a little under 50% of them (76.5 million), to Harris’s 48% (74 million). So Trump probably won the popular vote by about 2.5 million votes, or 1.6%. This is the third smallest margin of victory in a presidential election since 1888.¹ A LANDSLIDE! MANDATE! it ain’t.

The nation in question is a democracy, a constitutional republic, and has been a 50/50 country electorally for some time now, bitterly divided ideologically, left and right. Even though this country wields a lot of influence culturally and economically around the world, increasing inequality at home has caused social unrest. Home prices have skyrocketed and the cost of living has risen precipitously.

The billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times says he’s soon going to install a “bias meter” next to all the news and opinion pieces in his paper, so readers will be able to push a button and tell ahead of time what the bias of the writer is, so they can decide whether or not to read the material, or how much credence to give it.

Thomas Friedman’s bracing op-ed in the Times on October 29 asserted that Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I.) will substantially emerge in the next four years and will “change pretty much everything.” The column is timely because Friedman argues that “A Harris presidency is the only way to stay ahead of A.I.” Harris will need to “pull together a global coalition to productively, safely and compatibly govern computers that will soon have minds of their own superior to our own.” Friedman thinks Harris is up to that challenge while Trump is clearly not.

Kierkegaard tells this parable in Either/Or: “A fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”

#1: No, “they” cannot control the weather. #2: Yes, American elections are safe and secure, and voter fraud is almost non-existent. But claims to the contrary are rampant online and from the mouths of Donald Trump and JD Vance, and will increase in meretriciousness and frequency over the next two weeks, as they try to undermine Americans’ trust in the voting process.

It is a political truism that vice presidents, and thus vice-presidential debates, don’t matter. No one wins or loses a presidential election because of their running mate, even if that running mate is as imbecilic as Dan Quayle or as incendiary and hateful as Sarah Palin.

The massive Trump rally on Saturday commemorating the July 13 assassination attempt on the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania was mostly a stately and somber affair, with remembrances of the dead and wounded that day and a moment of silence marking the time of the attack, 6:11, followed by an operatic rendition of “Ave Maria.” The event had a religious feel to it, with Trump saying he’d returned “by the hand of providence and the grace of God,” to “this hallowed place.”

In 1971, I wrote an essay on the history and future of public opinion polling. I concluded then that public opinion polls were here to stay, but any process based on the imponderable phenomenon of public opinion can strive to be a useful art, but never an exact science. Despite public misconceptions, polls can really do no more than reflect the intentions of voters at a given moment in time; the next moment the intentions are likely to change.

Half of the people in this country don’t vote. Paradoxically, these are the people who primarily decide things for everyone else in a democracy. The first thing they decide is that democracy is not something worth thinking about. The second thing they decide is that they are not part of this democracy and don’t care what happens to it.

I have never understood why so many working-class and working poor people stick with Trump. It’s just never made sense to me, why working people are attracted to a narcissistic billionaire who has never worked a day in his life and has always treated working people with utter contempt, as losers.

If Trump were to win back the presidency, how much would he owe his victory to the Techno-MAGA billionaires who are now supporting him and bankrolling his campaign? And how much power would these private sector supporters then have over this President?

There is at least some consensus today among the journalists of New York City (Donald Trump’s “enemies of the people”) about Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. The New York Times headline called it, “A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny, and Racism,” and the front page of the Daily News announced it as a “Racist Rally: Speakers Supporting Trump at MSG Event Insult Puerto Ricans, Blacks, Jews, and Harris.”

Every time I see Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s face, I feel remorse, because it inevitably reminds me of his father, who I revered and whose assassination in 1968 is as vivid and present to me today as it was then, when I was 15 years old.

The race-baiting xenophobic slurs about Haitians in Ohio were started by JD Vance more than two months ago, at a Senate Banking Committee hearing where he was trying to blame rising housing prices on immigrants. In August, a resident of Springfield posted in a private Facebook group that she’d heard that immigrants had stolen a neighbor’s cat. 

Even before the Trumpian Age, American electoral politics has always been a cruel arena. I was ten years old, growing up in a working-class family in a small farming town in Kansas, when President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas in 1963; twelve when Malcolm X was shot in 1965; and fifteen when Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot in Memphis, and Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles, in 1968; so, my budding political consciousness was largely shaped by assassins.

During the convention, Nate Silver had Kamala Harris up 20 points over Donald Trump to win the presidential election. As of September 5, Silver has flipped the scenario, with Trump up 20 points over Harris, and having a 60% chance of winning. “Harris is still ahead in many polls,” said Silver, “but she needs higher margins to win; her leads are relatively static, and time is running out.”