I applaud any and all efforts by Zohran Mamdani and anyone who supports holding the psychopath Netanyahu accountable for genocide. The madness of this war criminal — who has been actively annihilating the whole of the Palestinian people — walking about a free man and being welcomed by our country and others is the equivalent to praising Hitler in the midst of the Holocaust. Sheer madness. Thank you Zohran Mamdani!
It is beyond critical that we here in America deeply educate ourselves about the genocide in Gaza do everything humanly possible to stop our government from funding and sending the bombs that are making these war crimes, these crimes against humanity, this pure evil happen day after horrifying day. This includes refusing to support political candidates who are in the pockets of AIPAC. Please go here for Track AIPAC: https://www.trackaipac.com/. We simply must stop supporting politicians who are complicit with genocide and regardless of political party.
And this certainly includes our Representative here in Washington State. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is among the handful of democrats who has repeatedly voted in support of funding Israel, the Save Act, ICE, and other atrocities. My husband and I voted for her twice when she ran against the fascist Joe Kent, who later became part of the Trump administration (but actually quit when Trump started the Iran war). Today, given Marie's track record and if given a choice between her and a republican I will simply not vote at all. That said, gratefully!, there is a democratic candidate running in opposition to her who receives no AIPAC funding and stands firmly against genocide, the Save Act, and other horrors. We donate to Brent Hennrich and support him 100% (https://brenthennrich.com/).
We humans need to care enough, be brave enough, be grounded enough in wisdom, truth, compassion, and fierce love to do the deep dive into what our government ― including those in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party ― are enabling to occur. And we need to make the active and ongoing choice to refuse to be complicit with genocide. We must be united in doing the right thing. This madness must be stopped. It must! ― Molly
By Julia Conley
In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times Saturday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made clear that he plans to take any action available to him to ensure the city complies with the International Criminal Court's warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if the opportunity arises.
Netanyahu, said Mamdani, "belongs in The Hague," and he is currently examining whether his government has the authority to arrest the prime minister if he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September.
"He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court," said the mayor. "I will follow the laws that we have here in New York City because I believe that there is an importance in following the law as a leader who presides over our city."
He then clarified that "whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end."
The mayor told Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of the newspaper's "The Interview," that he is having "an active conversation with our legal department" to determine the scope of Mamdani's authority on the matter.
In November 2024, the ICC issued a warrant for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, who was killed by Israeli forces. Netanyahu was accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, where Israel began a relentless assault in 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack.
Israel and its top military funder, the US government, have insisted that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been targeting Hamas in attacks that are still continuing in Gaza despite a ceasefire that was reached last October.
But evidence has steadily mounted that children, aid workers, refugee camps, schools, and hospitals have been attacked, and experts found last year that Israel was intentionally starving Palestinians in Gaza as a method of warfare.
More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, and more than 173,000 people have been wounded. Israeli attacks have made Gaza home to the largest number of child amputees in the world, and have decimated over 90% of housing units in the exclave.
Garcia-Navarro questioned Mamdani on the "political weight" he gives to the issue of Israel and Palestine, which has seen a marked shift in US public opinion since Israel began its latest US-backed assault on Gaza. More than half of Democratic voters and nearly a third of all voters told The Associated Press last month that they viewed the war in Gaza as a genocide against Palestinians.
Three-quarters of respondents to a New York Times poll in May said they opposed continuing to send military aid to Israel, compared to 45% three years ago.
"It’s hard to explain to a New Yorker why their needs are not even being discussed, and yet we have billions of dollars to kill civilians halfway across the world," said Mamdani, who has been laser-focused during his term and his campaign last year on lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers and passing universal public programs.
"I think what we have seen from New Yorkers, what we’ve seen from Americans, when we talk about this hunger for a new kind of politics, it’s a hunger to move beyond the bankruptcy that characterizes a lot of politics today," said Mamdani. "And it is hard to find a more bankrupt policy approach than what our country has done to Gaza and to Palestine and how it hasn’t been specific to any one party. It’s been, again and again, an insistence to tell New Yorkers, and to tell Americans, that what they are seeing is not something they should in fact either be concerned by or believe in. It is hard to then turn to another issue and say, Believe me here."
Israel's ambassador to the United Nations said Saturday that Netanyahu will be at the UN meeting in New York City in September, despite Mamdani's threats—which date back to his mayoral campaign—while the prime minister said on a radio show this week that the mayor "hates America" and champions Hamas.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan said it was "pretty amazing to hear" Mamdani repeat his earlier conviction that Netanyahu should be arrested under the ICC warrant, given that he first publicly remarked on the issue "when he was polling at 1% in the Democratic primary polls and no one expected him to actually be mayor."
Netanyahu has thus far evaded arrest when traveling to countries that recognize the ICC's authority under the Rome Statute. The court opened an inquiry into Hungary last year when it failed to detain the prime minister when he visited. France also said it would not execute the warrant for Netanyahu because Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute.
UN Ambassador Michael Waltz responded to Mamdani's interview on Saturday, saying the US is also not party to the Rome Statute.
Journalist Zaid Jilani said that although the mayor of New York likely lacks the authority to arrest Netanyahu, "he can certainly troll him."
And the madness continues. Blessed are the truth-tellers like Stacey Patton who shine bright light on all this darkness, exposing the larger picture that is so important to understand and act to intervene and stop in any way that we can. And especially this means stopping our young people from enlisting in the American Empire's military machine and becoming one of those who are "on the “leading edge of lethality.” Sickens me. This is so insane. — Molly
I’d like to announce that we have officially reached the stage of American collapse where the secretary of war is gonna start checking soldiers’ soldiers’ ball-sac output before sending them out to defend the Empire. Never mind that this country’s president can’t even stay awake during meetings, while this country can’t even keep its bridges standing, its hospitals open, its children fed, or its people housed.
So now I guess if your neck ain’t thicker than your head, or if your resting face doesn’t tell folks you drink a dozen raw eggs and eat drywall for breakfast, then you’re ’bout to get referred to the Pentagon’s new Reich-certified Masculinity Laboratory for Hormonal Correction and Alpha Verification.
Y’all think I’m being funny, but according to the news, this week Pete Hegseth announced that military service members age 30 and older will be screened annually for testosterone deficiency. Younger troops can volunteer for testing and hormone replacement therapy if military doctors recommend it.
Hegseth sat in front of the camera lookin’ like a man selling tactical Nugenix, and said the goal is to make sure America’s “warfighters” have “the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best.” He insisted that this new program is not about “artificial enhancement,” but about “optimizing your natural capability,” creating “maximum psychological and mental readiness” and keeping American troops on the “leading edge of lethality.”
The leading edge of lethality?
Y’all hear that? He really fixed his lips to say that as if what this country is sorely lacking is state-sponsored killing efficiency.
Now, as usual, our dear mainstream outlets are treating Hegseth’s announcement like it’s just another ridiculous episode in his ongoing macho fuckery. Reporters have asked the obvious questions about mass testosterone screening and whether it is medically necessary, and a few pundits have linked Hegseth’s fixation to the broader manosphere’s crisis of masculinity.
But this is bigger than a middle-aged white man’s obsession with masculinity and his desperate need to perform alpha-male dominance every time he gets in front of a camera.
We’ve can’t look at this announcement in isolation. It is part of a deeper racialized and dystopian project to decide which bodies can represent American military strength, which bodies will be classified as defective, and which ones the state is authorized to medically optimize to wage violence in defense and preservation of a white supremacist future.
This same man who wants to check troops’ hormones for combat readiness has been blocking the advancement of Black and female officers with exemplary records by removing them from promotion lists, engineering combat standards around an explicitly male ideal to could drive women out of combat roles, and driving transgender troops out of the military, with some facing loss of retirement benefits they already earned. Also, remember back in May he told military graduates at West Point that “diversity is not our strength.” He has purged DEI programs and publicly sneered at “fat generals and admirals.” And his Pentagon disbanded its advisory committee on women, accusing it of advancing a “divisive feminist agenda.”
Look at who he has removed from leadership. Look at who he has humiliated as physically deficient. Look at who he has portrayed as some kind of ideological contamination. And now look at him expanding the state’s authority to measure hormonal fitness and offer biological correction in the name of “lethality.”
Y’all, this ain’t ordinary healthcare. This is some Nazi body sorting boolshit that authoritarian regimes do when they want to decide who is worthy of being perfected for state violence.
We already know that white supremacists love to say that white people are superior. But it doesn’t just stop at rhetoric. White supremacy tries to create an ideal human specimen that’s white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, disciplined, aggressive, emotionally hardened and prepared to dominate. Just look at all them Aryan fever-dream images that have circulated across the Department of Labor’s social media pages. Look at the white-nationalist slogans and almost exclusively white recruitment imagery pushed by the Department of Homeland Security. These agencies are not simply advertising jobs or military service. No. They’re teaching the public what an “American” body is supposed to look like, and who must be erased, expelled, or treated as biological failure.
Why does all this matter?
Because powerful white men cannot simply age, weaken and die because white supremacy has never presented them as ordinary human beings. It presents them as civilization’s natural rulers who are vigorous, commanding, biologically destined to dominate and entitled to remain in power long after their bodies begin failing them. And so their deterioration becomes a political crisis that must be hidden, medicalized, blamed on an enemy or technologically reversed. Trump’s decline must be concealed beneath makeup and mythology. McConnell’s absence must be managed with proof-of-life photographs. Graham’s death must become an international assassination plot. And now Hegseth arrives with the promise that the state can screen, supplement and repair insufficiently masculine bodies before sending them back out to defend the empire.
This is unfolding against a much larger atmosphere of white demographic panic: a shrinking white share of the population, an aging ruling class, historically low national fertility, communities devastated by suicide and drug deaths, and a younger America that is increasingly multiracial. Census projections show that non-Hispanic white people are on course to fall below half of the population, while the national fertility rate has declined by roughly 23 percent since 2007. White supremacy reads those changes not as ordinary demographic transformation or the consequence of political and economic abandonment, but as biological defeat.
That is why this pathetic testosterone campaign is more than one fool’s macho obsession. It is a fantasy of racial and imperial resuscitation. When the old patriarchs are visibly deteriorating, the white birthrate is falling, the population is becoming less white and the Empire itself looks exhausted AF, Hegseth offers the regime a syringe and calls it readiness. In his demented mind, American dominance can be restored by identifying the correct bodies, purging the supposedly defective ones and chemically juicing up the ones selected to carry white power into the future without end.
Ohhh, and where does this new “testosterone therapy” fit in Hegseth’s war on gender-affirming care? Apparently, hormones are dangerous social engineering when trans people receive them, but sacred military medicine when white men need help feeling sufficiently lethal. Ain’t it funny how “biology” always bends toward the political desires of white men.
Ohhh, and never mind that actual medical experts have questioned routinely screening people who have no symptoms. Testosterone levels can bounce around depending on stress, illness, sleep, weight and intense physical training, which, last I checked, describes the basic operating conditions of military life.
Now, I’m not a medical doctor, but still I know how to interpret clinical guidelines. And from my understanding, you’re supposed to have actual symptoms and repeatedly show low test results before you can be diagnosed with this kind of hormonal deficiency.
Am I right?
But Hegseth is basically out here trying to say that you can simply be a 30-year-old holding a government-issued weapon and look like you’re insufficiently homicidal.
Ohhh . . . ohhh . . . OHHHH! And not to mention Y’all, giving people unnecessary testosterone treatment can suppress sperm production and create other health complications. Which is mighty fucking ironic for a political movement that spends half its time screaming about collapsing birthrates, white demographic decline, and women not popping out enough babies. So the Pentagon’s new strategy for preserving Western civilization is apparently to juice up the troops, shrink their sperm counts and hope nobody notices that the so-called “master race” forgot to read the side-effects label.
But apparently the Pentagon’s new medical standard is: if a white man is tired, irritable, overworked and serving inside a collapsing empire, don’t improve his living conditions, just check his balls and prescribe national renewal.
Pete Hegseth is not merely trying to make the military stronger. He wants to purge, rank, and rebuild the U.S. military around a white-masculinist ideal that will keep America’s racist war machine running for as long as chemically possible.
This is a truly excellent and deeply moving interview. There are actually many antidotes to the poisonous polarizing propaganda which plagues our nation and our minds and much of the world — if we know where to look.
My long-term ongoing experience is the awareness of the vital need to cultivate discernment in which resources of information we can trust and which we cannot.
This can be very difficult in our culture. However, if we are courageously committed to following the threads of truth deeper and deeper, and no matter where they lead, it is possible to recognize and connect with those resources which are not aligned with either major political party in America, which are not funded by any corporate or wealthy special interest, and which embody unwavering courage, integrity, wisdom, and a profound commitment to truth.
I have known Chris Hedges and his work for decades and he embodies all of that. This particular interview empowers us to more deeply understand where we are and how we got here. The integrity found in this conversation demonstrates how truth-telling can occur without pitting democrats against republicans or vise versa. Dividing us up into us versus a dehumanized Other acts like a poison inside of our individual and collective minds and hearts. Instead of pointing fingers of hatred outward, we are given the opportunity here to take a deep dive into the layers of propaganda that decades of neoliberalism have tragically brough upon us and which has had a profound impact on ushering us into the horrors that we face today.
And there is hope. Understanding these deeper truths is painful, disturbing, and also freeing. The truth frees us to become empowered to act out of consciousness and wisdom, something so sorely needed within ourselves and everywhere. I hold the vision that more and more of us will turn to courageous wisdom-keepers and truth-tellers like Chris Hedges and those he interviews, which certainly includes the amazing Turkish author Ece Temelkuran. May we all be inspired to increasingly recognize fascism, resist fear, and restore our faith in humanity. — Molly
Turkish author Ece Temelkuran’s books teach us to recognize fascism, resist fear and restore our faith in humanity.
Forced to leave her home country due to political and economic repression under the dictatorship of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish author Ece Temelkuran sought an understanding of how a population can be led down the path to fascism. Whether it is under Narendra Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey or Donald Trump in the United States, she found that the stages are very similar and so are the mistakes people make along the way. Temelkuran strives to provide readers with an understanding of the roots of the fascist new world order and the language necessary to change direction.
In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Hedges and Temelkuran discuss her newest work, “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century,” and a previous book, “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism.” Temelkuran connects the crises of today to the neoliberalism of the late twentieth century, which made promises of prosperity but instead destroyed social infrastructure and financial security and increased state repression to subdue resultant popular struggles. Hedges calls this ‘cutthroat capitalism’, a system that divides people and pits them against each other and against their own interests. Temelkuran states, “I think people have been cheated enough with this liberal democracy promises, which were never fulfilled, so, they are perhaps taking a revenge on the entire political establishment.”
While it is tempting to believe that ousting particular political leaders, such as President Donald Trump, will solve the current crises, Temelkuran emphasizes that the crises are systemic in nature and require a long-term approach to organizing resistance.
Fundamental to that effort is breaking with a culture of fear, hatred and hostility that has been instilled by the ruling class. In this new world order, Temelkuran explains that more people are becoming ‘unhomed’ in the sense that the life they once knew no longer exists and won’t return. The antidote is a greater sense of connectedness and solidarity, of realizing that we are all vulnerable in a state that knows no boundaries in the violence, exploitation and displacement it will inflict on populations. Many people in the United States are waking up to this new phenomenon and are searching for answers. Temelkuran advises, “What neoliberalism made us believe, a dim view of humanity, we need to see that humanity and have faith in it…. Our entire economic and social system stands upon that fundamental definition of human.”
It is of profound importance that we are an informed populace here in America. Given the information and inspiration that I have witnessed, listened to, and absorbed from numerous wise and courageous truth-tellers — who have been empowering me for decades in an ongoing way to shed layer after layer of my indoctrination, ignorance, and illusions — I am inspired to again post this piece that I wrote last year related to the shadow side of the centrist democrat Heather Cox Richardson. And what is a "centrist" democrat? The answer is a neoliberal. Tragically, most Americans continue to not hear of or understand what neoliberalism is — which has been likened to living in Russia and not knowing what communism is.
I share this piece once again because today I fully get it in my deepest self the danger that people like HCR — and countless others like her who pose as knowledgeable historians, journalists, authors, politicians, and spiritual leaders of integrity — in reality are a threat to us all when they are anything but worthy of our trust. Yet so many of us, which certainly has included myself, are vulnerable — and especially when those like HCR are listened to, followed, believed, and trusted by thousands or millions of American citizens who have not been taught to discern the difference between facts and truth and subtle or blatant dangerous disinformation.
This illuminates why there is such an urgent need for increasing numbers of us to courageously peel back the countless layers of propaganda that we are swimming in here in the United States. It is vital for us to come to understand that this poisonous polarizing propaganda is coming from both republican fascists and neoliberal democrats. And Heather Cox Richardson is 100% neoliberal. She and others like her need to be exposed for who they truly are and what they truly represent — which is the dangerous enabling of a polarizing status quo that stands as an overwhelming obstacle to the radical changes utterly necessary to dismantling the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy (a bell hooks quote) which has been impacting us all today and back through time.
May we work together to empower each other to be informed, to put principles before personalities, and to birth a new world — one in which we will embody, individually and collectively, the integrity and wisdom, the commitment to truth and justice, the passion for equality and solidarity and peace, and the compassion and generosity and fierce love vital to sustaining a habitable planet and caring world. — Molly
A Personal Critique of Heather Cox Richardson
March 23, 2025
Yesterday morning I saw that I was tagged in a post by Kenneth Burchell in which he wrote about the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, John Adams, Thomas Paine, and Heather Cox Richardson. It was a long, but well articulated and excellent piece, which you can find here: https://kennethburchell.substack.com/p/alien-enemies-act-1798.
This has inspired me today to follow up here with my response to Kenneth's article, and specifically as related to my ongoing concerns regarding Heather Cox Richardson. I also acknowledge and suspect that this will be triggering for some who read what I have to say, and it is obviously okay to disagree with me. I am very aware that HCR has a loyal following of thousands. I simply have a very different experience.
It has now been many years since I first read Heather Cox Richardson. It was a piece in which she was endorsing the neoliberal Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the run for the presidency. And I recall that she was attributing the single factor behind both the republican and also the fierce progressive pushback on Clinton as being rooted in misogyny. That was when I recognized that she was missing a much larger picture that was critical for us to be aware of, understand, and absorb. Yes, misogyny was definitely a factor. And there was so much more! And all my red flags went up. And my anger.
So I did a search on HCR and what she had to say about neoliberalism. I only found one piece by her at that time in which she attempted to explain and help us understand neoliberalism — which obviously demonstrated to me that she didn’t understand it at all. (If you already haven't, please see my piece here about neoliberalism: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2025/03/some-thoughts-on-why-it-is-so-important.html.) To this day, a vast number of Americans tragically do not know what neoliberalism is. And those like HCR have contributed to our ignorance.
And then, more recently, Heather Cox Richardson wrote about Joe Biden in a favorable light, including denying that he was a neoliberal. She even asserted that Biden "intentionally sought to overturn forty years of neoliberalism by replacing market-driven policies with a system where the government actively protects ordinary Americans' ability to prosper." This was an absolute lie. Biden remained deeply in the pockets of the donor class and did nothing to stop the obscene radical redistribution of wealth upwards. HCR's comments truly made my stomach turn once again.
One other profoundly disturbing fact that is unjustifiable and totally unacceptable is HCR's complicity with Biden as related to the genocide of the Palestinian people that this administration has funded. She consistently refused to call out Biden's cozy relationship with the psychopath Netanyahu and the corporate democrats for participating in ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the horrors taking place everyday in Gaza. She also failed to condemn Biden's harsh responses to protests on college campuses by those who were demanding their universities divest from the systems responsible for funding genocide. This collusion by Heather Cox Richardson with Biden and his administration and their total failure to stop Netanyahu's genocidal war of annihilation, for me, makes this woman not worthy in any way of our trust or support.
What I am illuminating here that I see in HCR is a very disturbing pattern that I've witnessed in which the Democratic Party is painted as always being in the right, thus adding to both our ignorance and the poisonous polarizations and propaganda which run rampant in our society. How can we expect republicans to be accountable when democrats aren't also modeling that behavior? (Not that all aren't — the progressives in the Democratic Party are absolutely calling out the neoliberals in their party along with the fascists in the Republican Party.)
HCR demonstrates to me that she does indeed want to keep history and all democrats “comfortable” and positive. And in doing so she fails miserably in pointing out the shadow side of the neoliberals in the Democratic Party who have played a major role in bringing us Trump. Twice. Added on to that is their support of Netanyahu's genocide of the Palestinian people. And it is these same corporate owned democrats who today are horrifyingly not standing up to the current fascist regime of Trump and his administration.
I am so exhausted and done with the comfortable, simplistic, polarizing, inaccurate, and dangerous narratives that say all republicans bad, all democrats good.
Heather Cox Richardson does some good work. Yes, this is true. That said, she is also severely compromised. Time and time again she has failed to bring us the truth of the larger pictures that are so vital for us to know. And it is the elements of truth combined with historical misinformation, polarizing political propaganda, and collusion with atrocities that makes her dangerous.
Knowing who to trust for our information is critical. Absolutely vital to the welfare of us all. As Chris Hedges has said, "We cannot change the world if we cannot understand it." May we all be passionate seekers of truth, wherever it may lead.
Bless us all,
Molly
P.S. I share all of this with the deepest humility knowing that I am on a lifelong journey of learning and shedding layer after layer of the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal system (bell hooks words) that we've all been swimming in for decades and centuries. Each day is a new opportunity to open to new vistas of awareness, truth, compassion, wisdom, and love.
To those who are wanting to understand more about
neoliberalism, please watch this short documentary:
*****
Please also refer to this excellent article by Dr. Stacey Patton,
who is herself an award-winning journalist, historian,
Dr. Stacey Patton — a black award-winning journalist, historian, author, and college professor — is so right on! Blessed are the wise and courageous truth-tellers and warriors for justice and fierce love! May then inform and inspire us all! — Molly
Did Y’all watch Donald Trump’s hot mess of a prime-time address from the White House last night? I did. And it was basically a televised séance for the 2020 election.
Can y’all believe that six years later, this Orange Menace is still standing over that rotted political corpse with a Ouija board and Rudy Giuliani’s old hair dye, begging it to rise from the dead and tell America that he actually won that election?
Btw, where is Rudy?
Any body seen that melting gargoyle lately? I wonder if he’s out there somewhere still hiding from creditors, hoarding bottles of Just For Men, and waiting for Daddy Trump to remember he exists.
Anyway, I watched that hot mess last night. And as I listened to Trump’s lies I kept thinking, “Sir. It is 2026. Why the hell are you still out here talking about that election?” It made no sense.
I mean, look at the state of this country. Food, housing, and healthcare costs too damn much. Hospitals are closing. Infrastructure in this country is shitty. Student loans are crushing people and families are losing benefits. Universities are being bullied into submission. Civil servants are being purged while journalists, judges and political opponents are under attack.
The country is at war. Then there’s a ceasefire. No, we at war again. The Strait of Hormuz done closed. Wait—it’s open! Never mind Y’all, it’s closed again.
People are being snatched, terrorized and shot in broad daylight by masked ICE agents. Folks are worried about their jobs, retirement, health care, their children’s futures, and whether democracy will survive the Trump regime.
The republic is falling and this man had the gall to drag everybody into primetime so he could roll out of his grievance crypt to reopen a cold case of his wounded ego. He told us, once again, that an election he lost six years ago was somehow stolen by China, undocumented immigrants, voting machines, mailboxes, invisible ballots and everybody except the millions of Americans who simply got sick of his corrupt ass.
But of course he did. His lie was not retrospective. It was preparatory. Consider the backdrop of his speech.
His Justice Department has been suing states for access to statewide voter-registration records, including sensitive personal information. In March, his regime ordered federal agencies to construct new citizenship-verification systems using DHS and Social Security data, and thank goodness federal courts blocked key parts of that effort to seize greater control over voter rolls and mail ballots in June and July. He is also attacking independent media, dismantling the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and using federal homeland-security funding to pressure states into adopting Washington’s rules for determining who qualifies as a legitimate voter.
Predictably, much of the mainstream news coverage of the speech has remained trapped in the familiar fact-checking frame by asking questions like: Was China involved? Are noncitizens actually voting? What did the intelligence documents say? Which networks carried the speech?
This kind of reporting obscures the larger strategy which is designed to condition the public before Election Day. This was not an election-security address to the American people. It was a preemptive alibi designed to create a pretext for exerting federal control over the elections and to prime his followers to reject any election outcome that does not keep him and the Republicans in power.
Trump knows the Republicans are vulnerable. So he is planting the lie early. If his party wins, it will have been a beautiful election, a perfect election, maybe the most secure and greatest election anybody has ever seen in all of human history. Many people are saying it, very smart people, election people.
But if the Republicans lose, suddenly Xi Jinping, Tyrone and n’em from Atlanta and somebody’s undocumented abuela formed an international criminal syndicate at the public library.
Y’all, this is what authoritarian propaganda looks like. It does not wait until after defeat to invent the conspiracy. It conditions the public beforehand to demonize the opposition, reject any result the leader does not like, and convince the public that only your victory can be legit. Trump is not waiting to lose before attacking the results. He is trying to poison public confidence before voting even begins. And I want Y’all to please notice the audacity of a man who tried to overturn an American election now lecturing the nation about election integrity. That’s like an arsonist calling a press conference about smoke-detector safety.
Several major networks, ABC, NBC and CNN, refused to air the speech live, and naturally Trump treated that as further evidence of a conspiracy. Because narcissists do not recognize editorial judgment and concerns about the spread of misinformation. They only recognize obedience and betrayal.
When it was all said and done, America did not receive a presidential address last night. What we got was advance notice that Donald Trump intends to put the 2026 election on trial before a single ballot is counted. He essentially said that not only will a Republican defeat be evidence of fraud, the media will be treated as conspirators and election officials who certify the results will be treated like enemy combatants.
The old fool wasn’t predicting fraud in that speech. He was preparing his followers to excuse interference, reject the results and pull another Jan. 6 if Republicans lose. One thing folks need to understand is that speeches don’t only misinform people, they also create permission structures to justify things like voter suppression, intimidation, official interference, refusal to certify results, and political violence as legitimate acts of “defending” democracy.
And listen Y’all, we also need to connect that ‘election security’ speech to Trump’s massive ICE buildup and continued reign of terror on families and communities. It belongs to the same governing project.
First, you gotta keep telling the country that immigrants are invading us, committing crimes, and stealing elections. Then you hire thousands of federal agents and turn them loose in communities with minimal training and let them treat every person they shoot as acceptable collateral damage in the defense of the homeland. So do you see how his speech supplies the mythology and ICE supplies the muscle? Trump is manufacturing an enemy large enough to justify a federal force powerful enough to terrorize everybody else.
That is how authoritarian power expands its reach. It identifies a disposable population of people, practices brutality on them, trains the public not to care, and then expands the category of people who deserve it. So what we saw last night, was a degenerate president giving ideological cover to an enforcement machine that has just recently left people dead people in Texas, Maine and immigration detention centers across the country.
Y’all, at this point, the kaleidoscopic deviance of this operation is the point. And no, Trump is not engineering all of it by himself. He is the dim-witted, bloated orange mascot riding atop a much larger machine built by lawyers, donors, ideologues, federal appointees, think tanks, data brokers, media propagandists and Republican officials who know exactly what they’re doing.
Every time you turn the tube, the same corrupt pieces rearrange themselves into a fresh little pattern of authoritarian boolshit: voter suppression, federal intimidation, media threats, immigrant scapegoating, conspiracy theories and state violence. Trump may not understand every gear inside the machine. He does not have to because he’s vain and shameless enough to front and sell it, and dangerous enough to let the whole republic burn as long as his name rises above the ashes.
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