Ian Welsh

by Tony Wikrent

Global famine deaths rise as leaders use food as a weapon

David Pilling and Heba Saleh in Cairo, August 25 2025 [Financial Times, via Funding the Future]

For decades, the number of people dying from famine was in retreat, reduced to almost nothing by a world intolerant of witnessing people starving to death. Not anymore.

From Sudan to Afghanistan, Yemen and Gaza — where a UN-backed panel declared a famine on Friday — experts say more people are dying of hunger as public opinion shrugs and humanitarian agencies lose their ability to counter leaders willing to use food as a weapon.

“About 10 years ago, famines began to make a return, and over the past few years we have seen the numbers dying from starvation begin to escalate in a terrifying way,” said Alex de Waal, a famine expert and executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (NSSM200), also known as the “Kissinger Report”

[Wikipedia]

… the NSSM200 was drafted primarily by Philander Claxton and drew attention to the idea that global population growth was of concern to long-term US economic and other global stability interests.^[1]^[3] The policy recommendations to address population growth was openly concerned with the potential appearance of “economic imperialism” and should be carefully approached so as “not be seen … as an industrialized country policy to keep their strength down or reserve resources for use by the rich countries”, with a written goal of “fertility reduction.” Local organizers were introduced to how aggressive population growth strains local economy and resources and to “emphasize development and improvements in the quality of life of the poor”, later explaining such projects were for these and “other reasons”.

“I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%. Once they win elections, it’s already too late.”

“We live in a Fascist nation, what now?”- by Chris Armitage

kumarplocher, August 25, 2025 [Daily Kos]

“I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%. Once they win elections, it’s already too late.”

“In 1933, German conservatives thought they could control Hitler. Two years later, they were being executed in their own homes. I spent weeks researching this question, desperately looking for counter-examples, for hope, for any time in history where people successfully stopped fascists after they started winning elections.

Here’s what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.

I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think….

And here’s the part that breaks your heart. Violence works. For them. Fascists use violence while claiming to be victims. They create chaos that “requires” their authoritarian solution. Then they purge anyone who opposes them. Meanwhile, democrats keep insisting on following rules that fascists completely ignore. They file lawsuits. They write editorials. They vote on resolutions. And fascists just laugh and keep consolidating power….

The statistics are brutal. Fascist takeovers prevented after winning power democratically: zero. Average length of fascist rule once established: 31 years. Fascist regimes removed by voting: zero. Fascist regimes removed by asking nicely: zero. Most were removed by war or military coups, and tens of millions died in the process….

Based on the historical record, there are exactly three ways this goes. Option one: Stop them before they take power. Option two: War. Option three: Wait for them to die of old age….

So let’s stop pretending we’re in the “prevention” phase and start talking about what you do when fascists already control the institutions but haven’t fully consolidated power yet. Because historically, nobody’s been here before, not like this….

America Tips Into Fascism. Today is different than before.

Garrett Graff, August 25, 2025

The United States, just months before its 250^th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed.

I think many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from “democracy” to “authoritarianism.” Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different.

Today, August 25, 2025, is that morning. Something is materially different in our country this week than last….

Saying that our country has tipped over an invisible edge into an authoritarian state plainly is important — and easier than most in the media and pundit class will pretend it is. They will presumably for some period of time — perhaps even a long period of time — stick to euphemisms (with lines like “No president has asserted such direct and sweeping control over the nation’s capital” and “Through immigration crackdowns and cultural purges, President Trump is wielding government power to enforce a more rigid, exclusionary definition of what it means to be American.”) and continue to give voice to “both siders,” but the reality is that only one political party is responsible for this moment. They will say that Trump’s motives are inscrutable or unclear — but the effect of Trump’s governing style is undeniable.

American fascism looks like the president using armed military units from governors loyal to his regime to seize cities run by opposition political figures and it looks like the president using federal law enforcement to target regime opponents.

American fascism looks like the would-be self-proclaimed king deploying the military on US soil not only not in response to requests by local or state officials but over — and almost specifically to spite — their vociferous objections….

It looks like a president, who is supposed to be the figurehead of the party of small government, is extorting US companies for the regular act of doing business — earning his good will in recent weeks has required seizing parts of major US companies or imposing bizarre taxes on others in exchange for his personal support.…

It looks like a country where our largest and most powerful corporate titans line up to pay tribute personally — delivering literal gold to the president in full view of cameras — and where foreign governments bribe him with largesse as gross as a 747 plane for his personal use after he leaves office, and where media companies have to censor their own staffs in order to be allowed to operate.

It looks like a country where inconvenient figures are kidnapped and disappeared overseas to torture gulags with no due process or dumped in countries where they have no possible connection. Kilmar Albrego Garcia has been punished for months with the full weight of the US government simply because he embarrassed the Trump administration. It looks like a country where the government, devoid of irony, is reopening concentration camps on the site of some of the country’s darkest hours of history where it previously hosted concentration camps.

It looks like a government where agency by department, people who try to uphold the rule of law are being purged — sometimes for nothing more than personal friendships or because they voiced an inconvenient fact, and where even the loyalists deemed insufficiently loyal are cashiered. Billy Long, the stunningly unqualified former cattle auctioneer placed in charge of the IRS, evidently was removed after he tried to uphold the most basic legal requirements for sharing taxpayer data.

It looks like a country where Trump assumes he can control and dictate our history, what books we read, our arts, and even our sports heroes. He assumes there is no line between his taste and our nation.

Just months short of the nation’s 250^th birthday, Donald Trump is close to batting a thousand at speed-running the very abuses of power that led to the Founders to write the Declaration of Independence in the first place. Does any of this sound familiar:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences….

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On August 30, 2025

Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Is Consciousness Reality’s Organizing Principle? (Beyond Biocentrism, by Lanza and Berman)

By Ian Welsh

On August 28, 2025

Comments

Quantum mechanics is seriously weird. The majority of us have a model of the world based primarily on Newtonian physics. We believe in cause and effect. The universe is a giant machine following laws, and if there wasn’t a single conscious being in it, those laws would still be the same.

But in quantum mechanics particles like photons don’t exist as particles until observed. If a photon is given the choice of two paths, it takes both as a wave, but if measured and observed to see which path it took, it then takes only one.

The key point here is observed. If a measurement is in the past, the photon doesn’t choose which particle path it took until observed. (It may decohere, it doesn’t choose which way to decohere. Or that’s Lanza and Berman’s argument.)

Schrodinger’s cat is an attempt to scale this up to macro, and to show how absurd it is. “The cat is both alive and dead.” (It doesn’t really work, because the cat is conscious and observes.)

Lanza has written a series of books on Biocentrism, each more extreme than the last. Beyond Biocentrism is the third in the series.

Biocentrism takes the quantum physics at its face and tries to extend the consequences. It argues that nothing really exists except in potentiality (a range of possibilities) until it is observed by something that is conscious. This doesn’t have to mean a human, presumably any conscious being will do the job. Lanza discusses bird and fish and bats and dogs, all of whom observe the world differently than them, but I’d point out that evidence is coming in that at least some plants (almost certainly trees) are conscious. Perhaps single celled entities are, and we keep finding those in places like Mars and the subsurface oceans of moons and so on.

Lanza notes that the conditions for life, especially Earth life, are very specific. From atomic constants to the moon impacting the Earth in just the right way and winding up not orbiting the equator, nor destroying the Earth, the odds against a garden world like ours are astronomical. Even the odds of a universe existing which allowed for life in theory are astronomical.

Biocentrism resolves this by putting consciousness first. Concrete reality is formed by consciousness, so physical laws must confirm to what is required for life, since it is biological life which gives rise to consciousness. The odds go from astronomical, to “they had to support life, so they did.”

Lanza’s interpretations of the consequences of quantum mechanics or even of quantum mechanics itself aren’t always orthodox. For example, there’s a delayed choice experiment called the quantum eraser, in which finding out something in the future seems to change the past.

While delayed-choice experiments might seem to allow measurements made in the present to alter events that occurred in the past, this conclusion requires assuming a non-standard view of quantum mechanics. If a photon in flight is instead interpreted as being in a so-called “superposition of states“—that is, if it is allowed the potentiality of manifesting as a particle or wave, but during its time in flight is neither—then there is no causation paradox. This notion of superposition reflects the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Lanza interprets this as “no the change actually occurs in the past and there is a causation “paradox”, though in biocentrism it’s not a paradox, since consciousness is primary.

I don’t claim to know who’s right about this. Hopefully an experiment will be devised which resolves the issues. But Lanza brings it up in part to rescue free choice.

As you may be aware, experiments show that by the time we become consciously aware of making a decision, the decision has already been made. Biologists can tell that we’ll do something before we believe we’ve made the decision. Since neural activity is fundamentally quantum, Lanza attempts to rescue free will by suggesting that the decision is indeed made when we believe we did, it’s just that it changes the past thru the act of observation.

Without something like this, we are, in fact, biological machines and free will is an illusion. Blaming or taking credit for anything you have ever done, or anything you are, is ludicrous. You are just a cause and effect machine and your idea that you’re in control of any of it is an illusion. (Why that illusion should exist is an interesting question.)

I don’t consider myself qualified to judge Lanza and Berman’s work on Biocentrism. It might be substantially right and it might not be. But I do think he makes a good case that the science (which he describes at great length, including having appendices with the math) doesn’t allow us to cling to Newtonian or even Einsteinian views of the universe or our place in it. Something weird is going on when consciousness is required to cause packet collapse. Indeed, he even includes one experiment where the effect was scaled up to macro, though still a very small macro.

The world is strange. Far stranger than the still reigning consensus “folk” models suggest, and while biocentrism may not be correct in all its details, it’s worth reading and considering, because it takes quantum mechanics weird results seriously and tries to reason from them, rather than around them in an attempt to preserve as much of the older systems as possible.

At the same time, we must always be wary. After all, post-Newton very few people outside of some religions would have argued against a clockwork universe, and it turned out that informed opinion was, well, wrong. (Which doesn’t mean God made the universe in 7 days or any such nonsense.)

Still, this is the cutting edge, and we know at the very least that it puts a few nails in the clockwork universe’s coffin and at least a couple into the relativistic universe. To ignore it, and to pretend that consciousness isn’t much more important than we thought it was is head in sand style thinking. And Lanza isn’t some quack. His interpretation may be unorthodox, but he understand the science.

I think this, or one of the other Biocentrism books is very worth reading. Even if you wind up not buying the whole package, you’ll be forced to rethink what you “know.”

***

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Trump Is Running the Standard Purge and Control Playbook To Install Decline

By Ian Welsh

On August 27, 2025

Comments

Some years ago I wrote an article about how to run a real left wing government.

Seven Rules for running a real left-wing government

Of course, it was really a guide for how to change the ruling ideology of a society. Because, yes, elites, apparatchniks and what as might be called a deep state state exist. These aren’t all the same thing. There is plenty of private support for whatever the status quo is, especially at the highest levels, since whatever the ideology is, it put them in charge and benefited them. There are also a lot of mid level enforcers, bureaucrats (both private and public) and professionals who benefit from the status quo.

Anyway, two of the seven rules were specific to the problem of running a left wing government in a neoliberal world (it was 2016.) But here are the other five

Your First Act Must Be a Media Law
Take Control of the Banking Sector
Who Is Your Administrative Class?
Take Control of Distribution and Utilities
Reduce Your Vulnerability to the World Trade System

Control the Media: Now the wording isn’t always the best, but Trump has been on a constant attack against the media. He’s changed who is allowed to be part of the White House press pool and he’s made the media pay blackmail money. He’s now talking about removing NBC and ABC’s licenses. He may, he may not, but the threat makes them change.

Take Control of the Banking Sector: for the first time in its history, a Federal Reserve governor has been fired the President has always had this authority in theory (except over the Chair), but has never used it in practice. Ironically I once advised Obama to use this power to stop the Fed bailouts in 2009. Control over the banking sector is really control over the permission system: whoever is given money or the ability to create money can do things. Once you have your hands on the money-artery, nothing significant can happen without your permission.

Who is Your Administrative class: All systems have a class of people which run the bureaucracies. We have come to know ours as the PMC. Trump is replacing them, firing them in huge piles, and replacing them with right wing, often religious, fanatics. These are people who will give him his military parade (denied in his first term), who will extradite his enemies, who will break laws for him knowing that the Supreme Court (carefully packed during decades of preparation for this moment) will make what they do legal, and that in any case, the enforcer class is under Trump’s control.

Indeed, Trump has been purging the enforcer class and replacing them with people who would not have been considered qualified by the previous system. This is true of the military, the FBI and indeed of all the three letter agencies. Since ICE are his loyal brownshirts, needing no purging, they are being massively enlarged and given far greater powers.

Reduce vulnerability to the World Trade System: Let’s state this simply: the US had been losing the trade game badly for about fifteen years. China was coming on hard, Africa is lost, South America is almost lost, Russia is no longer complacent and America has lost the lead in over 80% of technologies. It can’t build ships, its planes fall out of the sky, most electronics are made elsewhere, it can’t even make magnets. It’s a joke.

So Trump is creating a two bloc system, there’s the US and its vassals (calling them allies amounts to lying) Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Korea. On the other side China, Russia, Iran, and their friends, which includes most of Africa and Asia and a good chunk of South America.

The US has slapped 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, and tariffs on almost everyone else. Why? Well, simply enough, the US can’t compete. If there is free trade, or anything approximating it, the US’s economy will be further cannibalized. Since they can’t sell overseas, except for chips, food and a few other goods, it’s time to stop competing. The US can’t win, so it’s not going to play.

The problem, of course, is that unless the US takes this time behind trade barriers to become competitive, it’ll just keep falling behind, and there’s only so much it can cannibalize its vassals. Given the massive slashing of research and universities, with no sign of a new system to replace them, it’s clear that the US has chosen semi-permanent decline.

Trump is Changing the US ruling ideology to Controlled un-development

It’s still about making the rich richer, but Trump’s choice is controlled decline. The US and the West will fall further and further behind, living conditions will get worse and worse, but the rich will become relatively richer in relation to everyone else in society. Think India in the post-war period. Fantastically wealthy elites, everyone else is a peon. Oh, there’s lots of ruin in countries, but this is the direction of the arrow and it only changes if a different ideology takes over.

Competition in the US between all groups will become far more savage, because there is no net. You get you hands on a position which commands resources or you become homeless or techno-peasant.

The vassals, who mostly have social welfare systems, will be forced to liquidate them, buy US military goods (which are useless against the US, given the software driven nature of them) and sell off all their public goods to continue the enrichment of elites. Any who try to avoid this fate will be coerced as necessary, first by their own internal elites.

This is the future in America and its allies. The only way to avoid it is to figure out how to defect.

***

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Trump Takes Share Of US Company Profits & Pentagon Guarantees Rare Earth Prices

By Ian Welsh

On August 25, 2025

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The US government is to take a 15% cut of Nvidia and AMD chip sale profits to China. There are also discussion of taking a 10% stock share in Intel.

Meanwhile the Pentagon has taken a hundred million dollar stake in a rare earth miner, and guaranteed minimum prices.

As Albert Pinto notes, this isn’t neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is dying, if not dead, in the US, though the Euros are clinging to it. Everyone’s noticed that China’s hybrid model absolutely trounced the West, and, hey, it’s a chance to get even richer. Pinto thinks that Trump is trying to change the nature of the oligarchy:

8/ Winters’ model of oligarchy:

1 Warring: armed oligarchs defend property claims separately

2 Ruling: oligarchs institutionalise defence

3 Sultanistic: 1 oligarch monopolises armed wealth and defence

4 Civil: state defends property regime Trump: US from 4->3?

Now I don’t think America’s oligarchy going to go Sultanistic, in the sense of one ruling oligarch. The only way that happens is if Trump manages to turn the Presidency into a Trump family matter, and that seems unlikely. But a rotating sultantic Presidency until, perhaps, someone manages to make it permanent: that’s possible.

But the days of laissez-faire are clearly over. Now this isn’t entirely stupid, I’ve been calling for what Trump did for rare earths for twenty years. It’s the obvious thing to do. Likewise, ensuring stable domestic production of necessary resources is sane and necessary and if one has to pay a little bit more, so be it.

Owning shares in US companies isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The truth is that every fundamental innovation which made the internet and smart phones possible was government funded. Tesla doesn’t exist without a massive government loan back when it was nothing. But the government doesn’t share in the upside nearly as much as it should, because large corporations pay almost no taxes. The government takes the risks (Solyndra was given about the same amount of money as Tesla at the same time, and went bankrupt) but doesn’t share in the upside. Tesla just paid back the loan, but if the US had an equity share, it’d have made out very well.

Golden shares, a 10% ownership in large or important firms used to be quite common. It’s not a new policy, but it used to be associated with the left wing. What’s going on now is a right wing version of the same thing.

The President is the strong man who runs the government. Everything private companies do they do because he allows it, therefore government has a right to a share of the profits and to exercise control when it chooses to. The President picks winners and losers, determines the effect of court decisions, and so on.

It’s the logical extension of the tendency to Imperial Presidency. Every other power in society is weakened, the President is above all. An elected dictator, as it were. (Similar to parliamentary democracies in that sense, but very un-American and without the protections of Westminister government, where new parties are possible and governments can fall easily.)

Right now the scramble is to see which faction will control the Presidency after Trump. The best bet is probably the tech-bro faction, since Vance is Peter Thiel, the Palantir surveillance state magnate’s creature. (Though puppets have a tendency to cut their strings when they attain supreme power.)

All of this entails a vast misunderstanding of how the Chinese public/private system works, by the way. For one, China probably has the most competitive (free) markets in the world in those sectors which are private. For another, the system is not run to maximize profit, but to produce certain social and policy outcomes, including a good life for the majority of the population. China has both deliberately reduced housing and rent prices, crashing the housing market and costing owners a huge amount of money, and it has been deliberately reducing the number of billionaires.

These aren’t incidental matters, and just saying “well, we’ll move to a mixed model” misses what makes China’s economy work so well.

But no society run by a financial oligarchy is capable of understanding that “more profit” isn’t the way to win economically, so America will continue to learn the wrong lessons from China. As for Europe, they aren’t even learning the wrong lessons, they’re just doubling down on austerity and increasing military spending in a way which will make some Americans rich and hardly help them at all. Not even in the game.

Yeah, America’s Gone Fascist

By Ian Welsh

On August 25, 2025

Comments

I think we can put a peg in this. For years everyone’s being “we’re going fascist.”

It’s done. It’s over. The US has gone fascist.

Purges of the military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to install personal loyalists;
Troops in the capital, armed, with law enforcement rights, and a promise to do the same in other cities;
Vast personal corruption by the man at the top, including blackmailing companies into personal bribes;
Masked men who often don’t show badges or warrants roaming the lands, forcing people to prove their citizenship (and often ignoring proof) and seizing people and throwing them into unmarked vans;
Full executive immunity;
A supreme court which has or appears poised to legalize all of the above; and,
Threatening ABC and NBCs broadcast licenses.
Yada, yada (add your examples in comments)

There isn’t much point in dancing around this. Perhaps there’s a technical case that this isn’t fascism, but some other form of nasty right wing government ideology, but whatever it is, the constitution and the important pieces of the constitution and bill of rights are dead or dying, including habeas corpus, the principle that no one’s above the law, the idea that troops shouldn’t be used domestically, etc, etc.

This has been coming for a loooonnnnngggg time, and plenty of people have warned about it. The fascism experts from Harvard who fled the country, much as many sneered at them, weren’t wrong in their diagnosis. Remember, a lot of people who left it too late to flee Germany (or Pinochet’s Chile, or your choice of example) got a permanent plot of land, a long government paid for stay in a small room or in Argentina a helicopter trip ending with a spectacular fall

(Pinochet is notable for training dogs to rape the wives of his opponents. Hopefully Trump won’t sink quite that low.)

I would suggest that the UK is almost there, and so is Germany. The EU as a whole, with its growing habit of just making protest and unwelcome parties illegal is trending hard. (Or, if you’re lucky, they’ll just make you a non-person, making it illegal for any bank or credit company to do business with you, or anyone to give you money.)

I don’t expect to spend a lot of time on this, though I’ll keep covering it. It’s been coming for a long time, it’s not a surprise and in some ways it’s not news. But a lot of people with suffer as a result.

For those who say “but Kamala” I note only that to win she had to either:

Not say that she wouldn’t have done anything different than Biden; or,
Come out against genocide.

Apparently supporting genocide was a red line for her, and fascism in the US a secondary issue. Neoliberals will always choose fascism over anything remotely left wing, including the left wing value of opposing a new Holocaust.

This is where we are.

***

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 24, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On August 24, 2025

Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 24, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Neoliberalism is not a viable option

Richard Murphy, August 22 2025 [Funding the Future]

… a fascinating blog post by someone called Blair Fix.

He analysed fascism in what seems like an entirely original way, showing that its roots are, in effect, in mediaeval theocracy, because the language used by those of fascist persuasion is remarkably similar to that found in some 17th, and maybe 18th, century political mediaeval theocratic thought, after which periods the language of the enlightenment displaced that of the theocrats, although the latter is now on the rise again….

In his analysis of fascist writing, Blair Fix identified three common threats. One was the significant overuse of violent symbolism. Words like annihilation, bloodshed, conquer, extermination and fighting were substantially overused when compared to the body of normal writing of the periods when fascist or similar ideas were written.

The second was a significant quantity of emotion-laden judgment, typified by the use of words like betrayed, cowardice, enemies, hatred, humiliation, slander and treason.

Third, he found there was a significant use of what appear to be quasi-religious, e.g. references to the Almighty, blessings, providence and the eternal….

The Deep Roots of Fascist Thought

[Economics from the top down, via Funding the Future 08-22-2025]

…In this essay, I’ll use word frequency to track the spread of fascist ideology. The journey starts with a trip to 1930s Europe, where we’ll encounter the works of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler (translated into English). The rantings of these two villains will serve as our corpus of fascist text. From this text, we’ll extract the ‘jargon’ of fascism — the words that Mussolini and Hitler use frequently and overuse relative to mainstream English. With this jargon, we’ll then track the popularity of fascist thinking in written language….

…In hindsight, the delusions of 2010 seem rather quaint. So was it then that neo-fascism first took root? Turning to our linguistic data, the answer is no. The seeds of today’s neo-fascism were planted decades earlier, in the 1980s. Figure 3 shows the trend….

…the fall of the Soviet Union left capitalism alone — free to be plagued by its own excesses. What would follow was a period of free-market cravenness which made the rich richer and left the poor to fend for themselves. Unsurprisingly, amidst the humiliation of this class war, dark ideas brewed. But for years, folks in the mainstream didn’t listen. Even when Trump won the presidency, elites dismissed it as an accident — a brief departure from the norm. It was not. Trump, it seems, is riding a wide wave of fascist discontent. We ignore it at our own peril….

…reflect on the common roots of injustice, which I think are fairly simple. They stem from the belief in innate inequality. Pick any horrific act, and you will find it easier to perform if you declare the victim a lesser human. Likewise, if you view the victim as your equal, the same act feels appalling. So it is the belief in human inequality which motivates injustice. And it is this shared belief in inequality which unifies the various forms of far-right politics. (This is Corey Robin’s thesis, explored in his book The Reactionary Mind.)²….

Figure 4: The deep roots of fascist thought in English writing. When we trace Mussolini and Hitler’s fascist jargon back in time, we find that ‘fascism’ seems to be overwhelmingly an ideology of the past. The frequency of fascist jargon was highest in 18th-century English writing and then declined continuously until the early 20th century. [Sources and methods]….

…Then I’ve tracked the frequency of these words over four centuries of German publishing. The results are unambiguous. In German books, the high point of fascist thought came in the 1600s, three centuries before Hitler seized power….

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]3

Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest

Alex Horton and David Ovalle, August 12, 2025 [Washington Post]

Trump’s FBI Raid of John Bolton’s Home Looks Like a “Five-Alarm Fire”

Greg Sargent, August 22, 2025 [The New Republic]

Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon explicitly declared the other day that ICE officers will indeed be employed during the 2026 midterm elections in large numbers to monitor voting booths, again floating undocumented voters as the bullshit pretext to justify it. Bannon is not in a position to compel this, of course, but it’s clear the MAGA movement now sees Trump’s militarization of cities as a precursor to the use of law enforcement and/or the military to intimidate voters in large numbers, or foment a crisis atmosphere designed to help the GOP, or both.

Last but not least, as we reported, a recent internal Department of Homeland Security memo outlines the hopes of senior DHS officials for substantially escalated military involvement in domestic law enforcement going forward. It even declares that military operations like the one in L.A. may be needed “for years to come.”

Trump Says Chicago ‘Probably Next’ for National Guard Invasion

Brett Wilkins, August 23, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Military lawyers to handle civilian crimes in DC

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]

Trump administration to begin continuous police-state surveillance of 55 million US visa holders

[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]

Trump’s “Truth” About Voting

Joyce Vance, Aug 18 2025 [Civil Discourse]

…Trump elaborated on the post Monday afternoon, saying the quiet part out loud: “If you [end] mail in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected,” he said in the Oval Office. Trump mumbles a bit as he’s making the comment, but the context is plain….

Trump claims that “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.” That’s not true. Countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland use mail in ballots, and there is no more suggestion of fraud there than there is here….

Trump claims he will sign an executive order to this effect (he hasn’t yet) because “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY.” That’s another wild and false claim. Congress sets the date and the time for national elections, but all other matters are reserved to the states, and each state runs its own elections with its own rules. If that wasn’t clear to Trump previously, it should be now. In June, a judge blocked the part of Trump’s March executive order that sought to stop states from counting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but arrived afterward. The judge emphasized that presidents can’t impose their views about how to conduct elections on the states….

Trump Demands: Ditch Vote-By-Mail. Republicans Shouldn’t

Bill Scher, August 19, 2025 [Washington Monthly]

…Donald Trump declared on his social media network that he is “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and that he will do it unilaterally. He continued:

“WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections. Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

‘Psychological warfare’: Internal data shows true nature of Alligator Alcatraz

[Miami Herald, via Naked Capitalism 08-21-2025]

Why are you so massively “obsessed” with Slavery?

Frank Vyan Walton, August 19, 2025 [DailyKos]

Trump: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future…”

“Slavery was very, very, very bad, and I hope that view continues to be reflected in our national museums,” said deputy opinion editor James Hohmann at the Washington Post….

Legal analyst and Substacker Aaron Parnas questioned Trump’s demand that museums talk about “the Future.”

“Also, why would museums talk about the future?” Parnas questioned….

Professor of human rights law Steve Peers mocked, “MAKE SLAVERY GREAT AGAIN!”

Power at any cost: It’s Trump Capitulation Disorder.

Thomas Mills, Aug 22, 2025 [PoliticsNC]

The FBI is raiding John Bolton’s house this morning. Bolton served as Trump’s National Security Advisor during his first term and as Ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush. Since the end of Trump’s term, Bolton has been a steady and harsh critic of Trump, calling him unfit to be president.

Alarm bells should be ringing, but, if they are, Republicans won’t hear them or won’t heed them. The people who once decried government agents as “jack-booted thugs,” now shrug when federal troops are deployed to US cities or the president uses the FBI to go after his political enemies, of whom John Bolton is one.

Republicans call Democrats’ fear of Trump’s authoritarian actions and impulses “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” In reality, their acceptance of behavior they once derided is Trump Capitulation Disorder….

Strategic Political Economy

How Trump Is Undoing 80 Years of American Greatness

Garrett M. Graff [New York Times, via The Big Picture August 17, 2025]

What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together….

Organizations like the national labs at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Berkeley that grew out of the Manhattan Project became the backbone of a stunning period of scientific and technological advances in the decades after the war. They were joined by the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (founded in 1958); and the National Institutes of Health, which became a major grant-maker after the war — not to mention a host of other agencies like NASA and the Department of Energy….

[TW: Graff is strictly correct in focusing on the Manhattan Project, but he misses the larger picture, which was the creation of a communal “team” of government, universities, and private institutions, organized by the national government to create and perfect the technologies needed to win World War Two. These included much more than the atomic bomb, such as radar, proximity fuses, the aerodynamics of laminar flow, penicillin, packaged foods, and more.

[Especially glaring is Graff’s omission of Vannevar Bush, the dean of Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who Roosevelt put in charge of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). At the end of the war, Bush wrote a report that firmly established the principle that science was a public good which required adequate sustained funding by the federal government:

Science the Endless Frontier — A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945

(United States Government Printing Office, Washington: 1945

[Writing in response to a request from President Roosevelt for an outline of what to do after the war, Bush argued that basic scientific research was essential for long-term technological progress and economic growth, and had to be supported even in the absence of any identifiable immediate commercial application or profitability. He called for the creation of an independent, federally funded agency to support basic research and talent development in universities and industry. Bush’s report directly influenced Congress’ creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. Bush’s model of the NSF is credited with promoting and steering the development of the computer, microchips and electronic miniaturization, the Internet, medical devices and procedures, and much more.

[In July 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published an essay by Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,”

Of what lasting benefit has been man’s use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved mental health.

Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial….

Erin Malone, June 16, 2002, Foreseeing the Future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush

In 1945 a seminal article appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Titled, “As We May Think,” the article’s author, Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), proposed a new mechanical machine to help scholars and decision makers make sense of the growing mountains of information being published in to the world. This article presaged the idea of the Internet and the World Wide Web and was directly influential on the fathers of the hypertext and the Internet as we know it today. Ted Nelson, who coined the term “hypertext” in 1967, describes Bush’s article as describing the principles of it….

George P. Landow, author of Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology says of Bush, “Bush’s idea of the memex, to which he occasionally turned his attention for three decades, directly influenced Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart Andreis Van Dam and other pioneers in computer hypertext. […] In “As We May Think” and “Memex Revisited” Bush proposed the notion of blocks of text joined by links and he also introduced the terms links, linkages, trails and web to describe his conception of textuality. Bush’s description of the memex contains several other seminal, even radical, conceptions of textuality.”