CARTOON: Day Before The World Changes

“The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it, and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia."

Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink

By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (1/19/25)

The world can change in a day. Those of us old enough to have been around, remember the world on September 10, 1993. Enjoy today as much as you can. Reflect on what it feels like. Let it sink into your memory, because tomorrow with Trump back in power the world as we have known it will be extinguished.

As weakened, neglected and torqued as they have been over the past 30 years, the last rights and vestiges of American democracy will soon feel as odd, mysterious and relevant as stone tools in a museum.

Some — like Chris Hedges — have been warning us for the past 30 years where we’ve been headed. We are now about to see where that is and despite the many warnings from Hedges and others — like Ralph Nader, Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky and Peter Dale Scot — not enough of us have done our homework. Tomorrow is the final exam day that will be unrolling for months, years — at least a decade or two. Maybe it is graduation day into permanent dystopia.

Time to toughen up. Learn about resistance. Cull out the silly political squabbles that keep us from focusing on the only issue Trump and the rulers fear: Class. Study how others got through what we will be living through.

I was blessed today having a conversation with two bright young people who see the world clearly; who understand what is upon us and feel defiant. They are not caught in the fake R&D dichotomy. Something we all need to embrace.

Embrace it and be free.

Walk away from it and die.

Resist
Persist
Don’t be complicit!

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Chris Hedges: How Fascism Came To US

We are a culture awash in lies.
Trump is a symptom, not the disease.
The Democrats are as quilty as the Republicans.

The Chris Hedges (1/18/25)

13-minute video

By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost (12/23/24)

For over two decades, I and a handful of others — Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader — warned that the expanding social inequality and steady erosion of our democratic institutions, including the media, the Congress, organized labor, academia and the courts, would inevitably lead to an authoritarian or Christian fascist state. My books — “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2007), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), written with Joe Sacco, “Wages of Rebellion” (2015) and “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018) were a succession of impassioned pleas to take the decay seriously. I take no joy in being correct.

“The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,” I wrote in “American Fascists” in 2007. “If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children — in short, the promise of a brighter future — the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.”

President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism. Deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, unchecked predatory corporations, including the health-care industry, wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, an electoral system that is plagued by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair, are a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they have deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful. The Democrats are as guilty as the Republicans.

“Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour.” “The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.”

“The usual reference to ‘amorality,’ while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.”

“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”

Inverted totalitarianism

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called our system of governance “inverted totalitarianism,” one that kept the old iconography, symbols and language, but had surrendered power to corporations and oligarchs. Now we will shift to totalitarianism’s more recognizable form, one dominated by a demagogue and an ideology grounded in the demonization of the other, hypermasculinity and magical thinking.

Fascism is always the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism.

“We live in a two-tiered legal system, one where poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes — which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by the New York City police in 2014 — while crimes of appalling magnitude by the oligarchs and corporations, from oil spills to bank fraud in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth, are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines, and civil enforcement that give these wealthy perpetrators immunity from criminal prosecution,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour.”

The utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism is a vast con. Global wealth, rather than being spread equitably, as neoliberal proponents promised, was funneled upward into the hands of a rapacious, oligarchic elite, fueling the worst economic inequality since the age of the robber barons. The working poor, whose unions and rights were stripped from them and whose wages have stagnated or declined over the past 40 years, have been thrust into chronic poverty and underemployment. Their lives, as Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled in “Nickel and Dimed,” are one long, stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded up-wastelands. Prisons are overflowing. Corporations have orchestrated the destruction of trade barriers, allowing them to stash $1.42 trillion in profits in overseas banks to avoid paying taxes.

Neoliberalism, despite its promise to build and spread democracy, swiftly gutted regulations and hollowed out democratic systems to turn them into corporate leviathans. The labels “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless in the neoliberal order, evidenced by a Democratic presidential candidate who bragged about an endorsement from Dick Cheney, a war criminal who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The attraction of Trump is that, although vile and buffoonish, he mocks the bankruptcy of the political charade.

A culture awash in lies

“The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour”:

It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is ‘correct.’ Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the ‘correct’ ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Chrtistian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true for the Christian right as it is for the corporatists that preach the free market and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.

The illusions peddled on our screens — including the fictitious persona created for Trump on The Apprentice — have replaced reality. Politics is burlesque as Kamala Harris’ vapid, celebrity-filled campaign illustrated. It is smoke and mirrors created by the army of agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television new personalities. We are a culture awash in lies.

“The cult of the self dominates our cultural landscape,” I wrote in “Empire of Illusion”:

This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.

My book “Empire of Illusion” begins in Madison Square Garden at a World Wrestling Entertainment tour. I understood that professional wrestling was the template for our social and political life, but did not know that it would produce a president.

“The bouts are stylized rituals,” I wrote, in what could have been a description of a Trump rally:

They are public expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a frenzy. These ritualized battles give those packed in the arenas a temporary, heady release from mundane lives. The burden of real problems is transformed into fodder for a high-energy pantomime.

It is not going to get better. The tools to shut down dissent have been cemented into place. Our democracy cratered years ago. We are in the grip of what Søren Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death” — the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement. All Trump has to do to establish a naked police state is flip a switch. And he will.

“The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it,” I wrote at the conclusion of “Empire of Illusion,” “and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying civilization.”

Link to story

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'To Instill Widespread Fear Is The Point': Trump Plots Chicago Immigration Raids

"It's a performance with serious costs for immigrant communities," said one critic. "And it's a performance to help sell their greater authoritarian agenda."

By Jessica Corbett
Common Dreams (1/18/25)

Citing four unnamed sources, The Wall Street Journal reported late Friday that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's administration intends to start delivering on his long-promised mass deportations with "a large-scale immigration raid" in Chicago, Illinois that "is expected to begin on Tuesday morning, a day after Trump is inaugurated, and will last all week."

"The Trump team intends to target immigrants in the country illegally with criminal backgrounds—many of whose offenses, like driving violations, made them too minor for the Biden administration to pursue," according to the newspaper. "But, the people cautioned, if anyone else in the country illegally is present during an arrest, they will be taken, too."

After considering which "sanctuary cities" to target, "they settled on Chicago both because of the large number of immigrants who could be possible targets and because of the Trump team's high-profile feud with the city's Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson," the Journal detailed. "Large immigrant centers, such as New York, Los Angeles, Denver, and Miami, are also in the incoming administration's sights, and more targeted raids could come."

Know your rights

The Trump transition team, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and representatives for Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker did not respond to the paper's request for comment, but the Democratic governor on Saturday circulated "know your rights" resources from the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights on his social media accounts and pledged to "protect those rights and ensure our state laws are followed."

As that resource sheet notes, people questioned by ICE officers have the right to remain silent, and the federal agency's officers must have a warrant signed by a judge to enter a private residence without consent.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that "Beatriz Ponce de Leon, deputy mayor for immigrant, migrant, and refugee rights, warned City Council members of the impending street sweeps during a series of virtual briefings Friday" and advocates are "organizing 'know your rights' workshops and distributing cards in Latino neighborhoods with bilingual information on residents' legal rights."

Under the Welcoming City Ordinance, the Chicago Police Department does not document immigration status or share information with federal immigration authorities. WGN pointed out that "Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Chicago Park District, and Community Colleges of Chicago have all been directed not to allow ICE access into any of its buildings."

According to The New York Times, which spoke with two unnamed sources and obtained related correspondence, "hundreds of agents were asked to volunteer" for ICE's "Operation Safeguard," and the agency plans to send roughly 150 agents to Chicago.

Tom Homan, Trump's incoming "border czar" and former acting director of ICE, previewed the administration's targeting of the Illinois city while attending a Northwest Side GOP holiday party last month, telling other attendees that "Chicago's in trouble because your mayor sucks and your governor sucks," and if Johnson "doesn't want to help, get the hell out of the way."

Selling the lie

In a social media thread about the reported plans for Chicago, Zachary Mueller, senior research director at the advocacy group America's Voice, said that Trump's administration "will parade out some number of immigrants who have committed serious crimes, to sell the lie that this is about protecting the American people. It's not."

"Don't fall for their trap," Mueller continued. "There will be arrests in other cities to say that this is not weaponized raids as [a] political attack on political opponents. But the [performance] to instill widespread fear is the point. Fear to immigrant communities. Fear to any elected official not in a major city of the cost of speaking out."

"Homan wants a confrontation. They want to perform the narrative for their audience they are taking it to the 'enemy within," Mueller added. "It's a performance with serious costs for immigrant communities. And it's a performance to help sell their greater authoritarian agenda."

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, responded similarly, saying Friday: "The actual operation described in the piece (100-200 agents) seems not that unusual for ICE (Google Operation Cross-Check). Expect a PR blitz, though."

"Not to diminish... the impact, but from [the Journal's] reporting it seems that the scale of this is entirely precedented. ICE has done similar operations in the past. This seems mostly about generating media," Reichlin-Melnick explained.

"As many people have said, it is going to take time for the Trump administration to ramp up immigration enforcement," he added. "In the meantime, however, they are going to basically slap a 'mass deportation' logo on the side of every regular ICE operation."

Economic impact & Dem conspirators

In addition to sounding the alarm over how Trump's mass deportations are expected to impact the estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants in the United States and their families, migrant rights advocates and experts have warned that the plan, if fully implemented, "would deliver a catastrophic blow to the U.S. economy."

Although Trump won't be president again until his Monday inauguration, Republicans on Capitol Hill are already pushing forward the GOP's anti-migrant agenda, with help from some Democrats in Congress. On Friday, 10 Democratic senators voted with Republicans to advance the Laken Riley Act, setting it up for a final vote next week.

Those 10 Democrats are Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), Maggie Hassan (N.H.), Mark Kelly (Ariz.), Jon Ossoff (Ga.), Gary Peters (Mich.), Jacky Rosen (Nev.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), and Mark Warner (Va.). Gallego and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who did not vote on Friday, also co-sponsored the bill. …

Read the rest & links for information on immigrant legal rights