Riane Eisler: New Narratives That Are Integral to Our Human Evolution

Photo by Molly

New Narratives That Are Integral 

to Our Human Evolution

Many cultural stories worldwide present the domination system as the only human alternative. Fairy tales romanticize the rule of kings and queens over “common people.” Classics such as Homers Illiad and Shakespeare’s kings trilogy romanticize “Heroic violence.” Many religious stories present men’s control, even ownership, of women as normal and moral.

These stories came out of the times that oriented much more closely to a “pure” domination system. Along with newer stories that perpetuate these limited beliefs about human nature, they play a major role in how we view our world and how we live in it. But precisely because stories are so important in shaping values, new narratives can help change unhealthy values.

Of particular importance are new stories about human nature. We need new narratives that give us a more complete and accurate picture of who we are and who we can be ― stories that show that our enormous capacities for consciousness, creativity and caring are integral to human evolution, that these capacities are what make us distinctively human.

― Riane Eisler

From The Real Wealth of Nations: 

Creating a Caring Economics

Pema Chödrön: The Endless Opportunities Of a Lifetime

Photo by Molly

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You're able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And, you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.

― Pema Chödrön

From Practicing Peace in Times of War

Dorothy Day: As We Come To Know the Seriousness of the Situation

 

As we come to know the seriousness of the situation, the war, the racism, the poverty in our world, we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather, it's a question of living one's life in a drastically different way.

People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.

― Dorothy Day

Omar El Akkad: At Least Fight Against the Theft of Your Soul

This is not an easy book to read. It breaks one's heart wide open — which is why I have been recommending it to everyone. I 100% agree with others that this book by Omar El Akkad is a devastating and essential read. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is indeed a meticulous, gutting autopsy of the conscience in a time of atrocity. 

For decades now people  have been asking and wondering how the Germans could have allowed the Holocaust to happen. At the same time, so many in our country are tragically not asking how can Americans not fight within everything we can to stop arming Israel?! How can it be that Netanyahu is welcomed by Democratic and Republican Presidents and politicians from both political parties when Netanyahu is a psychopathic war criminal every much as evil as Hitler who is in real time committing the genocide of the Palestinian people — and which is now spreading into Lebanon?! Why is the American corporate mainstream media refusing report in-depth about of these atrocities, war crimes, and crimes against humanity much less put them in the headlines every day?! How, why, who is enabling the annihilation of a whole population day after day, month after month, year after year?!?!

This is why One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a must read NOW. We must fiercely and loudly stand individually and collectively against genocide now, not someday! — Molly

A Compilation of Quotes From

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been 

Against This by Omar El Akkad

The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

* * * * *

One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption in hindsight of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. While the terrible thing is happening, while the land is still being stolen, and the natives still being killed, any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight. I tell stories for a living and there’s a thick thread of narrative by well-meaning white Westerners that exalts the native populations in so many parts of the world for standing up to the occupiers. Makes of their narrative a neat, reflexive arc in which it was always understood by the colonized and, this part implied, the descendants of the colonizer, that what happened was wrong.

The same people who did the killing and financed the killing and justified the killing and turned away from the killing will congratulate themselves on doing the right thing. It is very important to do the right thing, eventually.

It is a reminder that, in times like these, one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.

Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.

One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting.

But so many will remember. We say that, sometimes, when it's our children killed: Remember. And it may seem now like it's someone else's children, but there's no such thing as someone else's children. The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one's opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one's own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.

*****

The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity on our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you.

Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.

To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man's teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

It is an admirable thing, in a politics possessed of a moral floor, to believe one can change the system from the inside, that with enough respectful prodding the establishment can be made to bend, like that famous arc, toward justice. But when, after decades of such thinking, decades of respectful prodding, the condition one arrives at is reticent acceptance of genocide, is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you?

And the obvious centrist refrain—But do you want the deranged right wing to win?—should, after even a moment of self-reflection, yield to a far more important question: How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning?

Anything to avoid contending with the possibility that all this killing wasn’t the result of a system abused, but a system functioning exactly as intended.

It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.

Of course the Republicans would be worse. What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point. Suddenly, an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more” starts to sound a lot like “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.

I understand this is just how things are, ethical double-jointedness being a necessary requirement for the daily debasements of modern political life. And yet I still wonder how someone can maintain this particular facade and sleep at night.

How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.

* * * * *

A reporter is supposed to agitate against power, against privilege. Against the slimy wall of press releases and PR nothingspeak that has come to protect every major business and government boardroom ever since Watergate. A reporter is supposed to agitate against silence.

To watch the descriptions of Palestinian suffering in much of mainstream Western media is to watch language employed for the exact opposite of language’s purpose—to watch the unmaking of meaning.

To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.

It’s come to shape the way I think about every country, every community: Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?

In the hierarchy of migration, “expat” is largely reserved for white Westerners who leave their homes for another country, usually because the money’s better there. When other people do this, they might be deemed “aliens” or “illegals” or at best “economic migrants.

It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.

It's a fascinating directive, "Go back to where you came from." One can't help but wonder how changed the world would be had the ancestors of the same people who use that phrase now heeded the same advice then. Overwhelmingly, it's employed against anyone who tries to make use of the freedoms on which the West so prides itself: the freedom to speak and to criticize, to hold power accountable. In this way, it shares a deep bond with the approach to free expression that can be found in most dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, the places so many immigrants fled: You are free to say so long as what you say is acceptable. Whenever I am told to go back to where I came from, I can't help but think: Why don't you go where I came from? You'd love it there.

There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher.

When next this [Gaza war] happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child), this same framing can always be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.

But the word “radicalize” feels wrong, seems to imply an element of extremism, as though rage at this kind of blatant hypocrisy is the abnormal thing, when what is plainly abnormal is to accept it.

The afflicted don’t need comforting, they need what the comfortable have always had.

* * * * *

Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate. Any population on whom this asymmetry is imposed will always be the instigators, the cause of what is and, simultaneously, the justification for what will be. The savage outside does, the civilized center must respond.

How does one finish the sentence: "It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…"

Ignore for a moment that the number is an approximation. Ignore the many more children mutilated, orphaned, left to scream under the rubble. Ignore the construction of the sentence itself, its dark similarities to the language of every abuser—You made me do this. Ignore all of this and think about how you would finish this sentence that has now been uttered in one form or another by so many otherwise deeply empathetic Western liberals. How to finish it and still be able to sleep at night.

Surely, many people have, and their answers might relate to terrorists or revenge or an all-encompassing right to self-defense. But trimmed to its most basic language, every proposed conclusion to that sentence is some variant of the same basic thesis: They would have killed more of ours.

What does unlimited fear cost? What will sate it?

* * * * *

In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire. A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously.

A political system that won’t restrict firearms even after a shooter massacres classrooms full of children, a system that shrugs when a regime murders and dismembers a journalist because that regime controls an inordinate amount of oil, a system that won’t flinch at the images of starving babies when it has the power to save their lives—what manner of resistance can’t such a system learn to abide? What use is any of it, what use?

The most glaring example in the Western world is Fox News, an entity that more than any other has normalized the practice of severing any relationship between the truth and what one wishes the truth to be. It’s a common refrain that the news industry has failed to come up with a functioning business model in the Internet age, but that’s not entirely true. Jettisoning the requirement to report news in favor of inciting the rage and fear and hatred of your audience before serving them up ads for guns and bunkers is a perfectly functional business model. It might not be journalism, might be the opposite of journalism, but the checks clear.

In a hospital. In a refugee camp. In their beds. While making dinner for their children. While holding their siblings. While cycling. While playing on a beach. In a market. In an incubator. Struggling to breathe, under the rubble. While trying to drag a loved one from the middle of the road. While burying the dead. While scavenging for food. While selling vegetables. While swimming in the sea, trying to catch fish. While playing soccer. While waving a white flag. With their hands raised in surrender. With their hands tied. While running away. At a checkpoint. In a torture camp. In a safe zone. In a school. While delivering aid. While waiting on aid. While performing surgery. While sitting down in a chair. By drone, from the safety of great distance. Live on air. Away from sight.

A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.

* * * * *

I think of a line that has always stayed with me, from Marwa Helal's "poem for brad who wants me to write about the pyramids."

"This is where the poets will interject. They will say show- don't tell. But that assumes most people can see."

It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit- exclaim, even- that no description of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it. At the very least, one should not be able to have it both ways. One should not, with a modicum of self-respect, quote Morrison and Baldwin at every turn, but then, faced with the sort of injustice with which so much of their work contends, suddenly retreat into descriptions of whatever it is the finches are doing. What is this work we do? What are we good for?

The literary critic Northup Frye once said, "all art is metaphor. And the metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity. Our derangement. The plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul. One's capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot, in any rational way, be understood. Only felt. Only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque- what we do to one another so grotesque- that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.

* * * * *

In a perfect world, politics is boring, informed by debate but assured of a mutual understanding that the civic good matters. It’s tree-cutting permits and public transport levies and people who go to school for years and years to learn how to best pass a thoroughfare through a residential area. Republicanism, in its current form, proposes the exact opposite—treason trials for political opponents, the stripping away of any societal covenant, a war on expertise. In the right-wing vision of America, every societal interaction is an organ harvest, something vital snatched from the civic body, sold for one kind of profit or another. It’s a vision that produces an almost unmatched clarity in the base, an unmatched loyalty: Which side of this operation do you want to be on?

I saw the terrible wrath of the place, saw it obliterate hundreds of thousands of people with names and ethnicity and religion like mine, knew for certain that there were deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing called “the free world.” And yet I believed the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable. Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.

It’s difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be.

The truth and reconciliation committees are coming. The land acknowledgements are coming. The very sorry descendants are coming.

To orient oneself in relation to this kind of equivocation as it exists in the West—where a genocide is a conflict of equals, and really who’s to say what a sufficient number of dead civilians is, and it’s all so complicated anyway—is to temporarily forget that most of the world sees this for what it is right now. This mandatory waiting period, in which the rest of the planet politely pleads with the West’s power centers to bridge the gap between its lofty ideals and its bloodstained reality, to do anything at all, is not some natural phenomenon, but the defining feature of neoliberalism. What purer expression of power than to say: I know. I know but will do nothing so long as this benefits me. Only later, when it ceases to benefit me, will I proclaim in great heaving sobs my grief that such a thing was ever allowed to happen. And you, all of you, even the dead in their graves, will indulge my obliviousness now and my repentance later because what affords me both is in the end not some finely honed argument of logic or moral primacy but the blunt barrel of a gun.

This work of leaving, of aiming to challenge power on the field where it maintains the least glaring asymmetry, demands one answer the question: What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else’s suffering? It makes it impossible for one so engaged to not understand, with terrible clarity, that under the auspices of this machine, the prevailing answer echoing from the mouths of so many of one’s own neighbors is: Nothing at all.

* * * * *

And it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children.

It's not surprising, I don't think, that in the midst of this indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most active work in opposing genocide are Jews. Here is love born of pain, if the past century's most horrific crime, love of one's own spread outward into love of another. Whatever the empire is, it has no idea what to do with this kind of love, which adheres neither to the empire’s own central principle of self-interest nor to the adjoining principle that solidarity is only with one’s own, that love for one’s people may never become love for another.

Anyone who has dragged a relative out from under the wreckage of a bombed building, who has held a friend bleeding to death in the street while the officer who pulled the trigger looks on, who has watched their water poisoned, their land burned, their communities starved, is intimately well versed in love. But in the eyes of the empire such a thing can never be called love, because the directive was never in the first place, Love, but rather, Love me. In spite of it all, love me.

Alongside the ledger of atrocity, I keep another. The Palestinian doctor who would not abandon his patients, even as the bombs closed in. The Icelandic writer who raised money to get the displaced out of Gaza. The American doctors and nurses who risked their lives to go treat the wounded in the middle of a killing field. The puppet-maker who, injured and driven from his home, kept making dolls to entertain the children. The congresswoman who stood her ground in the face of censure, of constant vitriol, of her own colleagues’ indifference. The protesters, the ones who gave up their privilege, their jobs, who risked something, to speak out. The people who filmed and photographed and documented all this, even as it happened to them, even as they buried their dead.

It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we’ll learn to lay tracks on air.

Please go here for more information:

https://www.nationalbook.org/books/one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this/

Derrick Jensen: We Must Learn How To Think Like the Planet

Photo by Molly

So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.

A culture that values production over life values the wrong things, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise.
 
All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?
 
We must learn how to think like the planet.

— Derrick Jensen 

Henry Giroux: Gangster Capitalism and Corruption in Trump’s America

This is such an excellent article. I have long deeply respected and appreciated Henry Giroux, and many of Henry's books line my bookshelves. What we are given in this piece and in the decades of his work is in-depth exposure of the many layers at the core of where we are at and what brought us here. So essential to know, absorb, and be empowered to act upon in any way that we can. And this necessitates our embodying a profound commitment to truth and the courage and passion to move beyond sound bites, distractions, disinformation, and the dangerous delusions we are chronically immersed in here in America. Blessed be the truth-tellers! — Molly

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

By Henry Giroux

Corruption as Authoritarian Spectacle

Corruption has never been far from the center of American politics. Some of the most notorious scandals stretch from the cronyism of Warren G. Harding to the abuses of power exposed during the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon. Yet many historians argue that what distinguishes Donald Trump from earlier corrupt presidencies is that corruption no longer operates behind closed doors, shielded by the liberal rituals of institutional legitimacy and the euphemisms of political decorum. Under Trump, corruption is performed openly as spectacle, celebrated as a sign of strength, wealth, vengeance, and personal loyalty.

Trump’s ever-expanding regime of corruption is no longer simply hidden financial misconduct but a public display of sociopathic avarice designed to normalize greed, lawlessness, unconstrained power, and the collapse of civic accountability. It reflects a politics of moral nihilism in which fascism no longer appears as a distant threat, but as the future already taking shape.

As a badge of honor, Trump embraces corruption not simply as a mode of governance, but as a spectacle designed to legitimate greed, cruelty, and unchecked power. It functions as what Dominic Wetzel has called the “pornification of the American dream,” a culture in which excess, lawlessness, and predation are celebrated as signs of success and strength. In Trump’s America, corruption metastasizes into a theater of cruelty and violence, saturating political life with the values of fear, spectacle, and disposability. It feeds a broader architecture of domination rooted in toxic hierarchies of race, class, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism, while turning lawlessness and untethered aggression into forms of political entertainment.

Corruption, in this sense, is more than a symptom of institutional decay, moral depravity, or political vulgarity. It becomes one of the central pedagogical and political mechanisms through which fascist politics takes hold, eroding democratic values while legitimating a culture organized around brutality, humiliation, and civic abandonment. In this formulation, corruption functions as a kind of fascist staging ground, creating the conditions that nourish what Jonathan Crary calls in Scorched Earth an “implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration.”

The Criminalization of Governance

What defines the Trump regime, then, is not merely corruption in the conventional sense of bribery or financial misconduct. Rather, it is the systemic fusion of authoritarian power, organized greed, spectacle, state-sponsored cruelty, and impunity, a fusion that transforms corruption into a governing principle and a cultural ideal. The display  of greed and the ensuing scandals are staggering in scope: the use of Trump hotels and resorts as political cash machines for lobbyists, foreign governments, and Republican operatives seeking influence; the funneling of taxpayer money into Trump-owned properties through Secret Service and government expenditures; the diversion of inauguration funds into private enrichment schemes; the use of cryptocurrency ventures and opaque political action committees as modern slush funds; the acceptance of lavish gifts, luxury travel, and aircraft linked to billionaire benefactors and foreign interests; and the open monetization of political access itself.

Added to this are Jared Kushner’s multibillion-dollar Saudi investment connections following his White House role, Ivanka Trump’s trademark deals and business expansions during the administration, and the nepotistic appointment of family members to positions of immense political influence. What emerges is a scale of self-dealing and lawlessness unprecedented in modern American politics. But these scandals are not isolated abuses of office. They point to a deeper transformation in which corruption becomes institutionalized as a governing logic, a mode of public pedagogy, and a defining feature of authoritarian power.

Trump’s corruption reaches beyond the traditional language of political scandal and increasingly resembles the operational logic of a criminal enterprise. The proposed $1.786 billion slush fund, tied to settlements for insurrectionists, corrupt opportunists, and other Trump allies, signals more than financial gangsterism; it reveals a governing structure in which enormous pools of money function as instruments of loyalty, reward, intimidation, and political protection. Walter Olson quoting Nick Catoggio is right in stating that “It’s simple theft packaged in the argle-bargle of “weaponization” and “compensation.” … The president behaves with impunity because he believes most of his party will unthinkingly defend anything he does, and he’s correct.”

 Taken together, these actions reveal a regime that increasingly resembles a criminal enterprise. Such practices build upon Trump’s decision to pardon more than 1,600 individuals convicted in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol, including participants involved in violent assaults on police officers defending the democratic process. The pardons transformed political violence into a badge of allegiance, signaling that acts committed in defense of the leader would not only be excused but sanctified as patriotic service.

At the same time, Trump has repeatedly used the pardon power to shield political allies, wealthy donors, and figures associated with spectacular forms of criminality. Among the most notorious was the pardon of Ross Ulbricht, associated with one of the largest online drug trafficking operations in American history. Added to this were pardons and commutations granted to numerous allies and supporters convicted of fraud, corruption, and financial crimes. For example the pardon of  Philip Esformes, who was convicted in one of the largest Medicare fraud schemes in U.S. history involving roughly $1.3 billion in fraudulent claims. Esformes became emblematic of a politics in which white-collar criminality is treated not as a threat to the public good but as negotiable currency within a system of transactional loyalty.

As journalist David D. Kirkpatrick reported in The New Yorker the Trump family has pocketed roughly $4 billion through a vast network of business dealings, political branding operations, cryptocurrency ventures, and influence-based transactions linked directly or indirectly to Trump’s political power. What emerges from these revelations is not merely a pattern of isolated ethical violations but the consolidation of a political culture in which corruption becomes normalized as both spectacle and governance. Wealth extraction, patronage, legal immunity, and political violence converge into a single authoritarian machinery fueled by fear, manufactured grievance, and ritualized loyalty to the leader.

Corruption, Fascist Culture, and the Death of Civic Conscience

If one face of fascist politics appears in the transformation of the state into an instrument of domestic terrorism, the other emerges in the fusion of political power and systemic corruption. Here, gangster capitalism reveals itself in its most predatory form as public institutions are hollowed out to enrich ruling elites, reward loyalists, punish dissenters, and normalize lawlessness as a mode of governance. Yet corruption under fascist politics does not operate only through institutions and economic arrangements; it also works through culture, emotion, spectacle, and the shaping of everyday consciousness.

 In this sense, corruption cannot be reduced to isolated scandals or individual acts of criminality. It becomes a cultural force and pedagogical weapon that assaults civic consciousness, erodes the social bonds essential to democratic life, and legitimates the mobilizing passions of fascism through spectacles of degradation, disposability, cruelty, and manufactured hatred.  It functions as part of a broader neoliberal pedagogy in which civic life is reorganized around the values of self-interest, commodification, hyper-individualism, and ruthless competition. Decades of market-driven propaganda, celebrity culture, anti-intellectualism, and disimagination machines have normalized a moral language in which greed becomes aspiration, cruelty becomes entertainment, and public goods become objects of contempt. Under such conditions, corruption becomes woven into everyday consciousness as common sense rather than recognized as an assault on the ideal and promise of a strong democracy.

Under fascist politics, corruption performs an even deeper and more insidious function. It not only rots institutions but destroys the ethical and civic sensibilities necessary for democratic life itself. By collapsing the distinction between public service and private plunder, between social responsibility and criminality, it deadens conscience, normalizes dishonesty and cruelty, and strips politics of any moral obligation to the common good.

What emerges is a culture in which greed becomes a civic virtue, lawlessness a measure of power, and the suffering of others merely collateral damage in the pursuit of domination. It is precisely this collapse of conscience into moral numbness and thoughtlessness that, as Hannah Arendt argued in Eichmann in Jerusalem and later in Responsibility and Judgment, creates the conditions in which authoritarianism flourishes.

In Trump’s political universe, corruption becomes an authoritarian performance of raw domination, flaunted openly because the point is not to hide criminality but to normalize it. The endless grifts, payoffs, family profiteering, intimidation campaigns, pardons, and transactional loyalties send a clear message to the public: democracy is no longer a shared ethical project but a marketplace of cruelty, patronage, and gangster capitalism.

As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has argued, these payoffs and pardons should not be viewed merely as rewards for past loyalty. They function as retainers for future acts of political violence and authoritarian allegiance. Like organized crime syndicates and autocratic regimes across the globe (particularly Hungary before recent Orban’s defeat in recent elections), such systems bind followers to the leader by making their legal troubles disappear while preparing them for future service to the movement. Pardons, financial settlements, political favors, and selective protections become mechanisms for constructing what amounts to a state-funded loyalty network, one designed to secure obedience not through democratic consent but through fear, dependency, corruption, and shared complicity.

Corruption as Public Pedagogy

Under such conditions, corruption takes on a pedagogical force. It teaches that democracy is for sale, that injustice is more important than justice, and that power belongs to those wealthy and ruthless enough to place themselves above accountability. The danger lies not only in the criminal practices involved, but in the broader cultural lessons they impart: that gangsterism can function as statecraft, that loyalty to the leader overrides loyalty to the law, and that democracy can be hollowed out through a fusion of choreographed outrage, corruption, and organized forgetting—fostered by an endless array of disimagination machines. To understand how such corruption secures mass consent, it is necessary to examine the cultural and media apparatuses that circulate its values and transform authoritarianism into a form of everyday pedagogy  and language that colonizes consciousness.

Digital Authoritarianism and the Culture of Spectacle

Corruption in the Trump regime does not operate in isolation from culture, media, and everyday life. It is enabled and amplified through a vast network of cultural apparatuses, digital platforms, and billionaire-owned media systems that normalize greed, celebrate ruthless self-interest, and elevate the values of neoliberal capitalism into a governing common sense. The tech oligarchs who dominate social media and digital communications do more than control information; they shape the emotional and pedagogical landscapes through which people learn how to see themselves, others, and the very meaning of politics. In this environment, corruption is no longer viewed primarily as a violation of public trust. In this environment, algorithmic domination and digital feudalism are presented as entrepreneurial cunning, personal branding, and competitive success, and the unapologetic pursuit of power in a winner-take-all culture. In reality, it represents a hyper charged form of instrumentalized evil.

The contemporary pedagogical terrain of gangster capitalism overwhelmingly favors the rich, the reactionary, and the politically powerful. Increasingly, large segments of the public, especially swing voters and younger audiences, no longer receive political information through traditional journalism or democratic public spheres, but through social media platforms, YouTube channels, influencer networks, and podcasts dominated by right-wing personalities such as Tucker Carlson, while algorithm-driven systems controlled by tech oligarchs such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg amplify outrage, misinformation, and authoritarian resentment. Some of the most listened-to political podcasts are hosted by reactionary figures who traffic in conspiracy theories, manufactured grievance, white nationalism, misogyny, and anti-democratic rhetoric.

At the same time, conservative political forces exercise enormous influence across YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and X, where outrage, fear, resentment, and spectacle circulate with extraordinary speed and emotional intensity. These platforms reward sensationalism, aggression, and emotional manipulation because outrage generates clicks, attention, and profit. They foster social fragmentation, alienation, atomization and, as Jonathan Crary notes, increasingly represent a “comprehensive global apparatus for the dissolution of society.”

 In doing so, they create a cultural and pedagogical environment in which authoritarian values acquire enormous legitimating force while critical thought, historical memory, and civic literacy are increasingly erased, punished, or rendered suspect. At the same time, they reproduce and normalize the poisonous grammar of fascist politics: lawlessness elevated to a governing principle, racial hatred and fantasies of racial cleansing shamelessly defined as matters of security and national purity, critical ideas banned or criminalized, genocidal violence in Gaza rationalized as policy, and the killing of journalists in war zones normalized as collateral damage in an age of organized barbarism. Under these conditions, digital culture no longer merely communicates politics; it becomes one of the primary pedagogical forces through which authoritarian identities, desires, and emotional investments are produced.

MAGA Aesthetics and the Pedagogy of Cruelty

What emerges under Trumpism is not simply a politics of corruption but a broader pedagogical cultural regime of criminality and state terrorism. Unlike older forms of authoritarian propaganda that demanded ideological belief and disciplined obedience, contemporary authoritarian culture demands shallow participation, emotional surrender, anti-intellectual performance, and compulsive circulation through the endless flows of digital media and the dangerous use of AI. Politics is transformed into political theater, meme warfare, and performative outrage. Participation no longer requires informed judgment or critical literacy; it requires emotional investment in spectacles of humiliation, cruelty, resentment, and tribal loyalty. Corruption becomes part of the ritualized displays of domination, flaunted openly as a sign of power, unchecked control, and immunity from accountability.

The endless circulation of memes, AI-generated fantasies, conspiracy theories, staged outrage, and celebrity-driven political performances creates a culture in which authoritarian values are absorbed affectively before they are ever examined critically. In this mediated universe, the language of democracy dissolves into branding exercises and algorithmically engineered emotional reactions. Here Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle becomes indispensable because politics no longer functions primarily through reasoned argument but through a theater of commodified images, manufactured emotions, and endless distraction. Equally important, Jean Baudrillard’s work helps explain how AI-generated fantasies and hyperreal political imagery circulate not because they are believable in any conventional sense, but because they produce emotional gratification untethered from truth, evidence, or historical memory. At the same time, Neil Postman foresaw a culture in which public life would dissolve into amusement and spectacle, eroding the very capacities necessary for democratic judgment and critical thought.

Increasingly, the corruption of politics is mirrored in the corruption of civic culture, public conscience, and moral judgment. The grotesque AI-generated videos and staged spectacles circulated endlessly by Trump and amplified through right-wing media ecosystems do more than entertain. They function as forms of authoritarian public pedagogy that normalize humiliation, cruelty, racism, hypermasculinity, and civic illiteracy as public virtues. In these digitally manufactured fantasies, Trump appears as a divinely ordained savior embraced by Jesus, critics are reduced to targets of ridicule and fantasies of degradation, and aggression against dissenters is staged as a source of popular amusement and emotional gratification. In one egregious AI-generated racist video, Trump portrays former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. Such spectacles matter because they erode the ethical foundations of democratic life, replacing civic responsibility, compassion, historical memory, and critical judgment with a politics of mockery, resentment, manufactured rage, and authoritarian pleasure. Politics no longer appeals to informed consent, ethical responsibility, or reasoned debate. Instead, it trains audiences to take pleasure in humiliation, celebrate unchecked power, and embrace cruelty as entertainment.

Disimagination Machines and Neo-Fascist Culture

Under this pedagogical regime, neoliberal values of toxic competition, unchecked self-interest, disposability, a commodified culture of immediacy, and market-driven survival merge seamlessly with authoritarian politics. Celebrity culture, algorithmic media systems, Christian nationalism, anti-intellectualism, and fascist theatricality fuse into what I have elsewhere called a disimagination machine, a powerful apparatus of public pedagogy that educates people emotionally before it persuades them intellectually. Its deepest power lies not merely in disseminating lies, but in shaping desires, identities, and emotional dispositions that render corruption, cruelty, and gangster capitalism commonplace features of everyday life. Authoritarianism becomes pleasurable, white nationalist movements and cult-like loyalties replace democratic solidarity, and public life is reduced to a brutal game organized around humiliation, extraction, and the thrill of domination.

What emerges from this machinery is a form of neo-fascist politics in which corruption is no longer a deviation from governance but one of its central organizing principles. Yet mainstream media often treats corruption as little more than scandal and spectacle, obscuring its role within a broader politics of disposability, extraction, and authoritarian control. What is at stake is a predatory system that hollows out democratic institutions while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a financial and political oligarchy bound together by fear, loyalty, and organized greed. But corruption alone is not the deepest threat. The greater danger lies in the cultural and pedagogical conditions that normalize it. In an age dominated by neoliberal disimagination machines, spectacle-driven politics, and manufactured ignorance, gangsterism is recast as strength, cruelty as authenticity, and lawlessness as freedom.

 In an age dominated by neoliberal disimagination machines, media-driven politics, and manufactured ignorance, fascist values and passions are no longer hidden; they are marketed, performed, and celebrated. In this scenario, corruption functions as political theater, a site where politics dissolves into the visual grammar of fascism.

Militarism, Hypermasculinity, and White Christian Nationalism

At its extreme, this culture of corruption and authoritarian spectacle converges with a politics that glorifies militarism, violence, and hypermasculine domination. One of the driving forces behind the systemic corruption that defines the Trump regime is the fusion of toxic militarism, white Christian nationalism, and a hypermasculine politics that glorifies violence, domination, and war. This deadly convergence is visible in Trump’s appeals to divine authority, biblical rhetoric, and crusader imagery used to justify military aggression and war-crime-level violence in Iran. It also appears in the militarized language of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-styled “Secretary of War,” for whom war becomes a theater of masculine redemption in which cruelty is defined as a badge of strength. Hegseth’s swaggering militarism might appear absurd were it not tied to the power of the state and its capacity to unleash violence at home and abroad. As Jasper Craven observes, his rhetoric is steeped in “Islamophobia, misogyny, and a distinctly toxic version of masculinity,” a poisonous language that turns militarism into a spectacle of aggression while elevating authoritarian brutality into a model of national identity and civic virtue.

Toward a Politics of Resistance and Struggle for Democratic Socialism

It is worth repeating that the crisis we face is not simply one of corruption, but of the accelerating destruction of democracy, as justice, historical memory, civic agency, and public conscience are hollowed out by the forces of predatory neoliberalism and authoritarian rule. Trumpism reveals how gangster capitalism, fused with authoritarian politics, transforms the state into an instrument of domestic terrorism, economic predation, and moral nihilism. It colonizes consciousness, erases historical memory, and rewrites history. Under such conditions, resistance cannot be reduced to legal reforms, ethics commissions, or appeals to civic decorum. History has shown where such forces culminate: in torture chambers, mass incarceration, concentration camps, and the institutionalization of cruelty as a governing principle.

What is needed is a fundamental rupture with a political and economic order that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of financial oligarchs while dismantling public goods, social protections, and democratic institutions in the service of organized greed. This is a struggle that must make education central to politics in order to change public consciousness as part of a wider struggle to dismantle the economic and political institutions of gangster capitalism.

In the end, the corruption at the heart of the Trump regime cannot be separated from the broader authoritarian and neo-fascist culture that both nourishes and legitimates it, a culture in which militarism, apocalyptic nationalism, toxic masculinity, gangster capitalism, and a politics of disposability fuse into a machinery of domination. This is a politics that wages war not only on democratic institutions, critical ideas, and public values, but also on the very conditions that make justice, solidarity, compassion, and collective freedom possible.

The struggle against authoritarian corruption must therefore become part of a broader struggle to reclaim politics as a moral, social, and collective project rooted in historical memory, economic justice, shared responsibility, and the radical promise of democracy life. Yet, this struggle must heed Frederick Douglass’s admonition that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” For Douglass, oppressive power never retreats on its own. It yields only when confronted by a collective force capable of disrupting its authority, exposing its injustices, and making domination increasingly difficult to sustain. In this instance, resistance becomes dangerous to authoritarian power not simply because it opposes domination, but because it embodies a collective moral and political energy capable of unsettling the very foundations upon which that power rests.

What is at stake is not merely the defense of liberal democratic norms, but the creation of a fundamentally different future. The challenges before us are to dismantle gangster capitalism and the fascist politics it breeds. In its place, there is the task of building a democratic socialist vision rooted in human dignity, solidarity, compassion, justice, equality, and the common good. As Douglass famously noted, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” This is the power of critical thought, mass resistance, and militant hope.

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Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/29/gangster-capitalism-and-corruption-in-trumps-america/

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