Barack Obama discussed the issues of democratic retrogression in a presentation in October. Here are some key points:
“I’ve become increasingly concerned about the rising wave of authoritarianism sweeping the globe,” Obama said in a video introducing the conversation, which took place in London.
The comments were a veiled, if clear, rebuke of not only the current US administration but also some of the leaders Trump has aligned himself with since taking office. …
[T]he former president offered an acknowledgment that sclerotic bureaucracies and unresponsive politicians had, in many ways, ushered in a global populist wave.
“In the United States, for example, there will need to be laws that are changed so that action can be taken more effectively, more quickly to respond to problems in a lawful way,” Obama said during his discussion. “I think what we’ve seen is that when people are frustrated, they’re willing to take any action, even if it’s unlawful, because at least there’s a sense of, something’s happening. That’s something that I think everybody has to internalize at this point.”
He acknowledged that centrist politicians had, in many instances, lost the pulse of voters and allowed some of the populist anger to take hold.
“A big challenge is that the governments themselves, whether center-right or center-left, were losing touch with people and weren’t delivering on some of the basic hopes and dreams of people, so you get frustrated with government, period,” he said. “That obviously then opens the door for right-wing populism, anti-immigrant sentiment, anger, grievances.”
He said wealth gaps and … complex modern economies had left people feeling “as if they don’t have control, and they feel as if their politicians often don’t have control over all the different forces there.” And he said social media was “very good at making people fearful of or angry about those who don’t agree with them.” [my emphasis] (1)
Obama is obviously intelligent and often eloquent. His comments are welcome to defenders of US democracy. And they vaguely hint at perspectives that could be helpful in pushing back against Trumpista authoritarianism.
But what he says in the above quotes also tiptoes around what the political and social pushback against authoritarians needs to be. For instance, why should Obama stick to what the CNN reporter calls “a veiled, if clear, rebuke” to Trump and other authoritarian leaders? Why doesn’t he just be clear about his points without the “veiled” part?
Comments like, “I think what we’ve seen is that when people are frustrated, they’re willing to take any action, even if it’s unlawful, because at least there’s a sense of, something’s happening” would certainly count as vague. But clear? That is something very like what European conservative politicians say when they want to try to position themselves for coalitions with xenophobic, far-right parties. A strategy which has very consistently led to strengthening the far-right parties.
And what sort of criminal actions does he have in mind that people would understandably take when they “are frustrated”? Would Obama defend people staging “bread riots” in the US if people soon start facing serious food deprivation because of Trump’s refusal to continue providing food stamps to qualified recipients in the current moment? A safe guess would be: no!
And why would generically being “frustrated with government” lead specifically to “right-wing populism, anti-immigrant sentiment, anger, grievances”? Do violent goons join ICE to beat, kidnap, and terrorize anyone they think looks Latino because they are frustrated filling out their income tax form? The problem with a completely vague diagnosis like “frustrated with government” doesn’t say anything about what are sensible concerns, as opposed to people being angry because they think there are too many people around who don’t look like Real Amuricans?
And when he says people “frustrated with government” because of “wealth gaps” and “complex modern economies,” what does that tell anyone the political framing or concrete policies that would address such frustration while defanging rightwing demagoguery? Does Obama advocate major redistributive measures to reduce the wealth of billionaires and increase incomes of working-class people? Measures like facilitating the formation of unions or setting national living-wage requirements, neither of which occurred during his Presidency? (The last increase in the federal minimum wage, to $7.25 an hour did take place in 2009 during the first year of Obama’s Presidency but it was mandated by the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007.)
Vague platitudes about “frustration or people feeling a loss of control just don’t tell us a whole lot about the politics of authoritarianism.
How could an American politician address such concerns in a more helpful and motivating manner? Well, here’s Al Gore this year: (2)
Gore can "bring it" when he wants to. I’m sure Gore knows he's poking the wannabe-"highbrow" Trumpistas in the eye by explicitly praising the Frankfurt School and Theodore Adorno and Jürgen Habermas specifically.
There's a bizarre rightwing theory pushed by people like Christopher Rufo is that the Frankfurt School spawned "political correctness" and "wokeism" and DEI as part of a decades-long Jewish Commie plan to undermine the White Man. This crackpot narrative even blames the Frankfurt School for creating “postmodernism” philosophy, which is just a bonkers claim.
Various figures associated with the Frankfurt School were Jewish and influenced by Marxist ideas, including Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin. Jürgen Habermas who Gore specifically mentions is currently 96 and is considered one of the leading public intellectuals in the German-speaking world, even the leading one. A student of Adorno’s, he is considered one of the Second Generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. The current Britannica article on him describes him as “the most important German philosopher of the second half of the 20th century.” (3)
It's a demented conspiracy theory. But the St. Charlie Kirk crowd takes that stuff seriously.
(2) Gore compares Trump administration's actions to Nazi Germany's attacks on the truth. NBC News YouTube channel 04/22/2025. <https://youtu.be/9uQoXRHsu2U?si=baAPmmQcP6asVayZ> (Accessed: 2025-07-11).
Israeli political economist Arie Krampf has described Netanyahu’s long-range perspective for Israel as follows:
Israeli political economist Arie Krampf has described Netanyahu’s long-range perspective for Israel as follows:
What I call the Netanyahu doctrine is based on geographic, institutional, and even mental separation between Israel as a globalized economy and Israel as a state that occupies a territory and engages in a territorial conflict. Elsewhere I have called this doctrine “hawkish neoliberalism,” a doctrine based on the premise that free markets must be harnessed to serve the national purpose. ...
The future of the Netanyahu doctrine also depends on the course of the Israel–US relationship because Israel remains significantly dependent on the US. Israel’s ability to forge independent relations with China and Russia has limits due to US concerns with technology transfer. It could be the case that after Russia’s war in Ukraine, a revitalized West led by the US will pressure Israel to realign its foreign policy, despite its increased financial independence. [emphasis in original] (1)
At this point, though, it’s hard to imagine the Trump 2.0 Administration pressuring Israel to realign its foreign policy, beyond trying to keep Israel from even more blatantly showing to the world that Trump’s Everlasting Peace Plan is not stopping its ethnic cleansing campaign and genocide against the Palestinians, as they continue to absorb illegal occupied into what Netanyahu party and government call Eretz Israel, i.e., from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea.
While progress in getting concrete agreements about Everlasting Peace Plan matters like the proposed peacekeeping force for Gaza is so far very slow (to put it mildly), Netanyahu and his allies are eagerly pursuing their goal of transforming Israel into a more and more authoritarian state. A former Military Advocate General, Yifat Tomer-Yurushalmi, was arrested and now moved to house arrest over the leak of video showing Israeli Defense Force (IDF) abusing prisoners. The real crime in the eyes of the Israeli right was not the criminal abuse, but the attempt to prosecute the crime and revealing it to the public. (2)
As the video illustrates, there is widespread support in the IDF and from Netanyahu’s government for the kind of torture of prisoners which the disputed video seems to show.
As Yossi Mekelberg of Chatham House says in the video:
The background of all of it is they [the pro-Netanyahu rights is trying] to dismantle the legal system, the judiciary as we know it in Israel, in order to derail Netanyahu's corruption trial. This is this is a kind of the fundamental issue here and for this they are ready to ruin the foundations of Israel[‘s] democratic system and harm also the gatekeepers.
He goes on to say that this incident:
... shows what he said [is] the completely moral bankruptcy of Netanyahu. It's not the release of the clip that undermines Israel. It's what is alleged to happen there [that] is the problem. And there are other cases that are not investigated. Whether the killing of journalists, killing of medical personnel, there are so many other cases that not investigated.
That's what compromises Israel morality.
The events of the last two years have severely undermined Israel’s image and credibility in the United States, including among American Jews. So the Netanyahu government is rushing to try to repair the damage by shoring up its propaganda (hasbara) operations, including among the critical Republican constituency of Christian nationalists.
It’s always important to keep in mind the bizarre twist that fundamentalist Christians like US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Christian United For Israel (CUFI) in membership the largest group in the Israel Lobby in the US, essentially believe that God’s plan for Jews who do not convert to Christianity is to have them burn in Hell for eternity.
Amid a sharp drop in support from the conservative right, Israel has hired firms to conduct not just "hasbara [public diplomacy] campaigns" but also campaigns targeting millions of Christian churchgoers, bot networks to amplify pro-Israel messages online, and efforts to influence both search results and the responses given by popular AI services like ChatGPT.
Among the experts recruited is a former campaign manager for Donald Trump and many of the other firms are linked to the Republican party or Evangelical communities, indicating that Israel is focusing massive efforts on communities once considered automatically pro-Israel. Among the campaigns' goals is fighting antisemitism, which has risen alongside the decline in support for Israel. Together, these campaigns signal a new phase in Israel's post-war public diplomacy strategy, and a shift in the way it uses agents - both AI and human influencers - for hasbara abroad. [my emphasis] (3)
This has always been a big risk for Israel to rely so heavily as it does on political support from American Christian nationalists and on rightwing parties and factions, including in Europe. Because those are the very factions in US and European politics that are the most influenced by actual anti-Semitism. (4)
Joshua Leifer has written about the loathsome politics of the far-right hardliner Nick Fuentes, currently being promoted by Tucker Carlson, a well-known Republicans media figure.
The Christian right in the United States is now in the midst of a fundamental ideological transformation. "Carlson and Fuentes' statements reflect a growing trend among American Christians away from a Judeo-Christian ethic that privileges the Hebrew Bible and certain Judaic ideals, and toward more Greek and Pagan traditions that emphasize Christian power and virility and look down on Judaism and Israel," explained Eliyahu Stern, a scholar of religion at Yale University and author of the forthcoming book, "Nowhere Left to Go: Jews and the Global Right, 1977–October 7." …
The immediate response by the Heritage Foundation – the flagship conservative think tank that is now driving much of the Trump administration's policies – revealed the magnitude of this shift. In a defiant, if also strange, video posted on X, Heritage president Kevin Roberts mounted a defense of Carlson and his choice to bring Fuentes on his show. And he did so not with the old Republican talking points, but in the new fighting jargon of Christian nationalism.
"My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and America always," Roberts said. "Conservatives," he continued, "should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or their mouthpieces in Washington." (5)
The posture of the Republican Party and far-right parties in Europe that claim to support Israel as an anti-Muslim ally is essentially: We hate Muslims and Muslims hate Jews and that means we can’t possibly be anti-Semitic.
Leifer warns, “The catastrophic war in Gaza reduced Israel to a U.S. protectorate. Now, Israel's fate increasingly rests in the hand of an American right that sees Israel as not as an asset but as a burden, and Jews as foreign adversaries of the West.”
Meanwhile, we have new developments in the Eternal Peace Plan: (6)
(6) Ben Ari, Lior (2025): Israel steps up strikes on Hezbollah as Lebanon fears renewed conflict in the south. Ynet Global 11/06/2025. <https://www.ynetnews.com/article/b1fyhb5kzg#autoplay> (Accessed: 2025-07-11).
The Oxford American last month published an article about Beatrice Alexander, in a story titled, “The Mississippi Ninth Grader Who Integrated the South.“ (1)
While the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision is considered the watershed end to racially segregated schools, Southern states resisted compliance, leveraging the directive to end segregation “with all deliberate speed” to move as slowly as possible. A decade after the Brown ruling, only 2.3 percent of Black students in the South attended predominantly white schools. Stonewalling in some places and token compliance in others slowed the rate of change. The 1969 Alexander case resulted in new language that replaced “all deliberate speed” with “at once,” forcing school districts around the South into immediate compliance. Pre-Alexander, in 1968, sixty-eight percent of Black students in the eleven states of the old Confederacy remained in all-Black schools. Post-Alexander, in 1970, the number dropped to thirty-four percent. By 1972, a higher percentage of Black students in the South attended predominately white schools than in the North. On that early morning in 2019 [when Alexander’s daughter searched her late mother’s name online], [Santrice] Ross learned that her mother had been the lead plaintiff in the US Supreme Court case that truly integrated Southern schools.
PBS’ American Experience produced this description of the case: (2)
This is the historical market on the “Mississippi Freedom Trail” recalling the case. So far as I’m aware, the Trump 2.0 Administration has not yet declared such markers an “antifa” incitement to terrorism.
And, yes, the Trumps and Stephen Millers and Gestapo Barbies of the world really would like to see us go back to a new version of the old American apartheid.
How did the good Christian segregationist white folks in the South respond to court decisions to the original Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954? (2)
(2) The law that desegregated schools overnight - What the History!?. PBS American Experience YouTube channel 09/11/2023. <https://youtu.be/-FcVBWIuR1U?si=9dWELd91wyqzq2xM> (Accessed: 2025-06-11).
(3) Day, John Kyle (2014): The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation. Jackson: University of Mississippi.
There is a coincidental but very appropriate that the news of Dick Cheney’s passing on November 3 mingling closely in time with the very notable Democratic elections victories on November 4. Dick Cheney is responsible for more damage to democracy and the rule of law than almost anyone else. And the encouraging anti-Trump, anti-Republican voting gives real hope that democratic sentiments will succeed in beating back Trump’s drastic authoritarian turn.
A Mississippi Free Press story dramatizes the election news: (1)
Democracy Now! provides this 12-minute obituary report with a very appropriate title, "’The Dark Side’: Dick Cheney's Legacy from Iraq Invasion to U.S. Torture Program.” (2)
The “dark side” reference comes from Cheney’s arguably most notorious comment included in the first minute of the report.
We also have to work, sort of, the dark side if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows and in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we're going to be successful.
This “dark side” work included a gruesome. lawless torture program that added new words to the American vocabulary, like “Abu Ghuraib” and “extraordinary rendition.” The Cheney-Bush Administration created a gray zone – or, better put, a law-free zone - in the US-controlled Guantanamo Bay used for long-term imprisonment and torture of those imprisoned there with no due process.
Jane Mayer did an important book called The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (2008). She quotes Alberto Mora, who served as the General Counsel of the US Navy. Mora was called in by the head of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) over concern about the torture program. Mayer wrote about Mora’s response when he looked at the evidence on the torture of a prisoner named Mohammed al-Qahtani at Guantanamo:
Mora said, "l was appalled by the whole thing. lt was clearly abusive and assaultive. It was also clear it would get worse. It could lead to creep, where if the violence didn't work well, they would double it[.]",,,. In Mora's view, the state-sanctioned cruelty was also "clearly contrary to everything we were ever taught about American values."
Looking back, Mora believed that the media had focused too narrowly on allegations of U.S.-sanctioned torture. Waterboarding, in particular, was covered as the sine qua non of criminality. As he saw it, the authorization of cruelty was equally pernicious. "To my mind, there's no moral or practical distinction," he said. "If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. lt destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America-even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It's a transformative issue.' [my emphasis] (p. 219)
And the cruelty was the main point. And it was part of the purpose of the torture program was to acclimate the American public and Republican voters in particular to not only hearing about sadistic cruelty being inflicted on The Enemy, but celebrating it. Donald Trump is carrying forward that approach even an even more public way, with both his ICE raids deliberately directed primarily against Latinos and his public bragging about illegal attacks on fishing boats, completely with video of the killings.
The fraudulent justification for the Iraq War was also a major project of Dark Lord Cheney during his Vice-Presidency.
Cheney’s actions were in pursuit of a key project of his, one literally subversive of the US Constitution, which is known as the Unitary Executive theory, one which the current rightwing Supreme Court has accepted in large part. This essentially holds that the President is an elected dictator and can wield power as President as he or she sees fit. Michael Evans of the Times of London describes this theory and also talks about Cheney’s foreign policy: (3)
Dick Cheney and his similarly-minded daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, became very critical of Donald Trump’s government. It’s a safe assumption that a big reason, probably the main reason, was Trump’s obviously incompetent foreign policy that also departed (in Trump’s erratic way) from the rhetoric of neoconservative foreign policy militarism.
But there are few if any individuals that played a bigger role in paving the way for Trump’s authoritarian rule than Dick Cheney.
(3) Trump 'secretly probably admired Dick Cheney' despite vice-president condemning the MAGA movement. Times Radio YouTube channel 11/05/2025. <https://youtu.be/H7OXYK3p4GQ?si=jqxEyWVXywvlm9qR> (Accessed: 2025-05-11).
The historian Sean Wilentz recently gave this interview on the state of democracy and the rule of law in the US right now. (1)
He talks in the interview about the subject of a 2021 article of his, “The Tyranny of the Minority, from Calhoun to Trump.”
The past that changes
The title refers to John Calhoun (1782-1850), a Senator and Vice President and vile secessionist who is also known as the Evil Spirit of American History. (At least that’s what I call him.)
Kevin Levin of the excellent Civil War Memory blog recently noted that he started his blog 20 years ago, when old-fashioned Lost Cause history was enjoying a bit of an online revival among fans of slavery and Confederacy. I was ahead of him by a year or two, starting in 2003. I first called my blog “Old Hickory’s Weblog” after Andrew Jackson’s nickname. At that time, it was still common for Democratic state parties to hold annual “Jefferson-Jackson Dinners” for annual fundraisers, the name referring to the two leaders considered the founders of today’s Democratic Party.
Also, both of them were know in their time as radical reformers. Jefferson also wrote the Declaration of Independence and served as the Revolutionary wartime governor of the rebel province of Virginia. A very young Andrew Jackson lied about his age to join the Continental Army. Later in his military career as a general, he fought and defeated the British invaders at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Technically, the British and the US had already made a peace agreement to end what is remembered in the US as the War of 1812. (Which was the last time the US attempted the Trumpian folly of trying to take over Canada, a different part of the story.)
But if the British had taken New Orleans, they would have controlled the mouth of the Mississippi River, which was critical for American commerce and would have allowed them to keep the US in a subordinate position indefinitely. Notably, the force Jackson assembled for the Battle of New Orleans included indigenous Choctaws and free blacks. (Isabel Allende in her novel Zorro even gave the literary swordfighter and heroic bandido a side role in the drama of the Battle of New Orleans.)
The French pirates Jean and Pierre Lafitte also allied with the American forces:
But later that year, the brothers managed to remediate their reputations. British officials had asked them to serve as allies and guides for the upcoming battle. Instead, Jean Lafitte reported the offer to the American authorities, and volunteered to join Jackson. “I am the stray sheep, wishing to return to the sheepfold,” he wrote to Louisiana governor William C.C. Claiborne.
At first Jackson wasn’t so thrilled, calling Lafitte “a hellish banditti.” But he reconsidered because of the pirates’ much-needed weapons and knowledge of the area. In late 1814, Jackson met with the Lafitte brothers to strategize the Americans’ defense. Where they met remains a matter of contention: The second floor at Maspero’s Exchange on Chartres Street or a secret room at Absinthe House on Bourbon? Both claimed the distinction. They still do.
There is no doubt, however, that the pirates’ participation helped turn the tide of the battle. Jackson was so impressed with the artillery skills of pirate Dominique You that he said: “I wish I had fifty such guns on this line, with five hundred such devils as those fellows.”
On Feb. 6, 1815, President James Madison granted Jean Lafitte and his Baratarians full pardons for past crimes due to their role in the defense of New Orleans. That made them one of the city’s first, if not last, scoundrels turned heroes. (3)
Jefferson was US Minister to France 1794-1789, where he was sympathetic to the republican sentiments of leaders like Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought on the patriot side in the American Revolution on behalf of France. He even allowed some patriot leaders to meet in the American Embassy to make political plans for the events that became the French Revolution. (The first American regime-change operation?)
The US at the time of Jefferson’s Presidency (1801-1809) was considered a radical democracy by world standards. As it was during Jackson’s (1829-1837). Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican Presidency who would go down in history as the Great Liberator for leading the war that ended slavery in the US, declared his two main models as President were Jefferson and Jackson.
But, as the saying goes, everything is relative. By today’s standards, the US during Jefferson’s and Jackson’s Presidencies wouldn’t even been considered democracies. Voting was restricted to propertied white males, though expanded male suffrage was a priority of the Jacksonian movement in the states. Also, slavery was legal. Both Jefferson and Jackson were slaveowners, though Jefferson professed to be against slavery. Jackson didn’t.
But when John Calhoun and his fellow traitors in South Carolina staged the Nullification Crisis to establish the right of slave states to ignore any federal effort to abolish slavery, Jackson came down hard against the attempt.
For that reason, Trump’s dumb pretense to take Andrew Jackson as a preferred Presidential hero was truly gag-worthy. I’m confident that the Orange Anomaly knows approximately zero about Jackson’s actual accomplishments and couldn’t care less.
But those in the cop-killing mob incited by Trump to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021? That was raw Calhoun-ism at work.
Still, democracy expanded by fits and starts in the US. And as concern for equal rights for minorities and the rise of a “postcolonial” view of recent centuries became better established, the reputations of Jefferson and Jackson began to look more tarnished. Jefferson-Jackson dinners fell out of favor even among their own long-lasting party. Jefferson and Jackson may have had some greater sense of fairness in dealing with Indian tribes than some other American leaders. But their Indian policies were bad. Nuances are important. But the J-J team would be wildly out of place if they were somehow magically transported to the US of 2025.
This blog’s current Hegelian-tinged name fits fine with the messiness of actual history and current politics.
Wilentz’ lessons from the past
Wilentz has a good appreciation of how to look at the relevance of events in the Jacksonian days to current issues. In his 2021 article, he wrote:
The deadly mob attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 — exhorted and then cheered on by President Donald J. Trump, with accountability later stonewalled by the Republican Party —was unprecedented in our history, but then again it wasn’t. It is true that never before had a losing presidential candidate, after pounding a Big Lie about a stolen election, helped to whip up a crowd into a murderous frenzy and directed it to prevent the official congressional certification of his defeat. The last time a losing candidate’s campaign tried to overturn the results, in the incomparably closer election of 1960, Richard Nixon’s supporters, having lost by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, tried to raise a stink about massive vote fraud in eleven states. But the Nixon forces gave way, after recounts, judicial decisions, and state board of elections findings — including those under Republican jurisdiction — went against them. Trump, the Roy Cohn protégé who has long regarded Nixon as insufficiently ruthless, pushed much further, to the point of sedition.
In another vaguely analogous historical example, Andrew Jackson in 1825 charged that a corrupt bargain had denied him the presidency after the uncertain electoral results of a four-way race threw the decision into the House of Representatives. Yet Jackson undeniably won strong popular and electoral pluralities, as Trump did not, his charges of behind- the-scenes chicanery were plausible if unknowable; and he raised no mob nor did anything else to interrupt the normal transfer of power. (Jackson participated in the inauguration ceremonies for the incoming administration.) Trump and his supporters have for years tried to fool the public into viewing him as the reincarnation of Old Hickory; but once again Trump’s subversive words and actions only dramatized their differences. [my emphasis]
Wilentz goes on to place Tricky Dick Nixon and the incoming Cheney-Bush team with their famous dispute over the Florida ballot count in 2000 in the dark tradition of John Calhoun.
And in a prediction that has worn well since 2021, Wilentz wrote:
The Trump Republican sedition has far from ended, and the worst may be yet to come. By helping to convince one in four Americans and more than half of all Republicans that Trump and not Biden is the “true” President of the United States [after the 2020 election], Trump and the GOP have in fact attempted nothing less than a kind of virtual secession from the American political system. Instead of founding a new country, Trump’s secession aims to stoke his followers’ intense resentments, have them withdraw any remaining loyalties they might have to the existing system of government, and re-attach those loyalties to an imagined pro-Trump nation within the nation — projects already well advanced long before Election Day [2020].
Notes:
(1) Professor Wilentz: We’re No Longer Living in a Truly Democratic Regime & the Rule of Law in the US. ECPS Brussels YouTube channel 10/30/2025. <https://youtu.be/JHeJRU4WcTI?si=5X16RBu_-c9iqsnk> (Accessed: 2025-02-11).
From the stereotypically establishment Foreign Affairs:
These [recent military] moves [by the US against Venezuela] reflect a recent, broad shift in the administration’s policy toward Venezuela. As reported by several major news outlets, for months after Trump’s January inauguration, internal debate pitted long-time advocates of regime change—led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio—against officials who favored a negotiated settlement with Caracas, including the president’s special envoy Richard Grenell. During the first half of 2025, the negotiators held the upper hand: Grenell met with Maduro and struck deals to open Venezuela’s expansive oil and mineral sectors to U.S. firms in exchange for economic reforms and the release of political prisoners. But by mid-July, Rubio reclaimed the initiative by reframing the stakes. Ousting Maduro, he argued, was no longer just about promoting democracy—it was a matter of homeland security. He recast the Venezuelan leader as a narcoterrorist kingpin fueling the United States’ drug crisis and illegal immigration, tying him to the Tren de Aragua gang and claiming that Venezuela was now “governed by a narco-trafficking organization that has empowered itself as a nation state.”
That narrative appears to have persuaded Trump. [my emphasis] (1)
As the authors emphasize at the end, “some might still argue that regime change is justified by the United States’ strategic interest in Venezuelan oil reserves, which are the world’s largest. But negotiations over U.S. access to those resources were working.”
Last week, Alejandro Velasco appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss Venezuela policy: (2)
This is one case where the Peace President Trump is following the neocon game plan.
Deutsche Welle recently did this backgrounder on the now-active armed conflict by the US against Venezuela: (3)
(3) What does Trump really want to achieve with his military actions in the Caribbean? DW News YouTube channel 10/30/2025. <https://youtu.be/HMhu9gSWrkg?si=3K8T1KWsOUz-_4sx> (Accessed: 2025-02-11).
We’re over three weeks into the Eternal Peace Plans which formally took effect on October 10. Here’s a Halloween Day report from the Associated Press:
There has been a long history since the Six Day War of 1967 of international efforts reach a diplomatic solution for the outstanding issues on Israel and Palestine, two successor entities of of UN’s partition plan of 1947. The official goal of the United States, the most powerful external player in the situation, was to achieve a two-state solution. Israel never actually accepted the idea.
After the recent two-years-plus war of Israel with Gaza – with much side action on Israel’s part in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar – reached a milestone with the Trump-based agreement in October that had the US, Israel, and Hamas that Trump touted as potentially an Everlasting Peace Plan. That included a ceasefire that apparently still is considered to be in effect. But it already has the distinctive characteristics of all the previous such agreements, with Israel making repeated attacks, always blaming them on action by the other side, in this case Hamas. A feature of this pattern is that the Israeli “counter”-attacks are very often much greater than the alleged triggering offenses by Hamas.
There is a difference this time in that most of the conflicts Israel has
had that are called wars were much shorter than this one. The Israeli armed
forces (IDF) were very active for two consecutive years. But the IDF is
structured on the expectation that its wars will be relatively brief and it
relies heavily on draftees. By all accounts I’ve seen, the IDF has been
experiencing real strains from Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2023-2025 Gaza War. (What
is conventionally known as the First Lebanon War of 1982-2000 did not involve the kind of intense continuing engagement of the most recent Gaza War, with the active combat mostly occurring inn 1982-83.
Overview of recent developments
Peter Beinart spoke recently with Muhammand Shehada and talked about the sad state of Trump’s Everlasting Peace Plan. It’s a familiar pattern. Israel concludes a ceasefire. Then they start violating it right away. Meanwhile, the so-called Peace Board is still not being created, which has to happen before the theoretical multinational peacekeeping force can start operating. (1)
Helena Cobban is an analyst of Middle East policy who has been keeping a close eye of what Trump advertised as his Everlasting Peace Plan of October 9 (which technically took effect on October 10). The “everlasting” aspect of it remain, uh, in question.
She calls it “a holding action for the [Palestinian] resistance” in this interview with The Electronic Intifada: (2)
In an August article, she stresses the particular effect that the US support for genocidal actions by Israel since October 7, 2023 has had on further diminishing American “soft power” in the Global South:
The fully U.S.-backed genocide that Israel has pursued for the past two years in Gaza has echoed a lengthy string of similar actions that “White” colonial powers– including the United States–have enacted against Indigenous peoples on all continents for the past five centuries. In today’s largely post-colonial world, this genocide has thus provoked a tsunami of revulsion across (and beyond) the whole of the Global South. This has greatly reduced the appeal and “soft power” that, before October 2023, Washington was able to deploy in its conduct of world affairs. It has also thrust the 30-year-long, de-facto hegemony that Washington has exercised over the UN’s global-level decision-making into ever sharper question. (3)
A key factor in understanding the ongoing situation is that despite the Everlasting Peace Plan, the illegal Israeli annexation of occupied territory in the West Bank continues. Jack Khoury reports:
What's happening in the West Bank has long moved beyond mere declarations. Hundreds of IDF checkpoints and gates restrict Palestinians' freedom of movement. Settlers repeatedly raid villages and attack property and residents, including olive harvesters, often with the accompaniment or tacit approval of Israeli security forces.
Private Palestinian lands are being seized, illegal outposts are being legalized and Israel's grip on the region keeps tightening without a Knesset vote or ceremonial speeches. De facto annexation unfolds daily, step by step, under a harsh apartheid regime that deepens segregation and cements control. (4)
There was a recent spate of countries formally recognizing a Palestinian state. This is a symbolically important step, and symbolism in international diplomacy is important. But the practical effect of those formal recognitions of a state that doesn’t actually exist on the ground on Israeli is limited.
The “two-state solution” has been key part of the international diplomacy over Israel, Certain tropes and common rhetorical diplomatic frameworks are often used in international relations, despite having only a tenuous relationship with reality. The idea envisioned two separate and independent states - one Palestinians and one Jewish - in the territory of what until 1947 the British mandate of Palestine. Something like that was possible in the context of 1947-1948, though the Zionist side never accepted the notion in practice. For reasons that have been intensively discussed internationally in the last two years, the Israeli government doesn’t even accept this as the basis of negotiation.
And Israel maintains control of Gaza, even though the Everlasting Peace Plan envisions it being somehow controlled in the immediate future by the Peace Board headed by Peace President Bush and the famously pacifist former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. (Yes, that’s meant to be sarcastic!) Even before the war began, Israel’s aggressive annexation policy in the West Bank, still formally an occupied territory, had proceeded far enough to make the fabled two-state solution impossible.
The only two realistic basic options are (1) a single, secular liberal democratic state including both current Israeli citizens and current Palestinians in the occupied territories; or, (2) a continuation of the still-ongoing Israeli policy of expulsion/ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The official goal of Netanyahu’s Likud Party and of his current government is a Jewish state in all of Eretz Israel, aka, the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
As Jonathn Shamir recently described the current diplomatic dance:
State recognition, however, has never been the core demand of the movement for Palestinian liberation. In fact, in response to theconsensusthat Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, Palestinians and those amplifying their message have made a uniform call for an immediate ceasefire, a halt in weapons aid and sales to Israel, and the imposition of sanctions. Absent these concrete measures, critics haveargued that recognition is little more than a trick—a sleight-of-hand meant to placaterestiveWesternpublics while perpetuating the same conditions that enabled a genocide against the Palestinian people in the first place. [my emphasis] (5)
Shamir judges that the “ultimate endgame” of the current Israeli government for Palestinians looks something like this:
[F]ragmented cantons under a compliant local authority that is tasked with administration but stripped of sovereignty, all while Israel retains its demographic and military dominance. The occupied West Bank already offers a grim preview of what this sort of “State of Palestine” would look like. From the Oslo years onward, Israel and itsWesternallies have used the PA’s lack of sovereignty over its land, borders, and resources, and its dependence on economic aid, as a lever to secure the body’s compliance. [my emphasis]
An apartheid state “From The River To The Sea,” in other words. He also reminds us:
From Netanyahu and his likely successor Naftali Bennett to the liberal figureheads Yair Lapid and Yair Golan, the entire Israeli political spectrum has been unanimous in rejecting the new international move for a two-state solution, claiming that recognizing Palestine is a reward for terrorism. [my emphasis]
But Ilan Pappe explains how Israel has used the “two-state solution” trope:
The two-state solution, as noted earlier, is an Israeli invention that was meant to square a circle. It responds to the question of how to keep the West Bank under Israeli control without incorporating the population that lives there. Tims it was suggested that part of the West Bank would be autonomous, a quasi-state. In return, the Palestinians would have to give up all their hopes for return, for equal rights for Palestinians in Israel; for the fate of Jerusalem, and for leading a normal life as human beings in their homeland.
Any criticism of this myth [of the two-state solution] is often branded as anti-Semitism. However, in many ways the opposite is true: there is a connection between the new anti-Semitism and the myth itself. The two-state solution is based on the idea that a Jewish state is the best solution for the Jewish problem; that is, Jews should live in Palestine rather than anywhere else. This notion is also close to the hearts of anti-Semites. The two-state solution, indirectly one should say, is based on the assumption that Israel and Judaism are the same. Thus, Israel insists that what it does, it does in the name of Judaism, and when its actions are rejected by people around the world the criticism is not only directed toward Israel but also towards Judaism. [my emphasis] (6)
But in terms of a practical goal now, Pappe gives a Halloween-ish description: “The two-state solution is like a corpse taken out in the morgue every now and then, dressed up nicely, and presented as a living thing. When it has been proven once more that there is no life left in it, it is returned to the morgue.”
A new US military base in Israel and international forces for Gaza
I recently tuned in to an October 29 Haaretz Zoom call featuring three of their journalists: Amos Harel, Dahlia Schindlin, and Amir Tibon.
Harel thinks that Trump at the moment is calling the shots on Israeli military actions, noting that Trump gave Israel a green light for the October 28 strike this week. They discussed the announcement last week, which Israel has preferred to downplay, that US Central Command (CENTCOM) has opened what it formally calls a “civil-military coordination center” on the ground in Israel itself. (7) Such a US military base inside Israel itself is a new thing in US-Israel relations, though it is not yet clear how much a distinctly new intervention by the US into Israel that may turn out to represent.
CENTCOM’s press release announcing its establishment says that “U.S. military personnel will not deploy into Gaza but will instead help facilitate the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance from international counterparts into Gaza.” (my emphasis)
Tibon notes that for the previous two weeks, the Trump 2.0 government did seem to be holding the Netanyahu government in check over Gaza. But he notes that the durability of Trump’s attention span is doubtful. He describes the current Israeli government as “ultra-extreme.”
Scheindlin describes some of the complications in trying to come up with specific plans for the vision of the Eternal Peace Plan for separate and distinct peacekeeping (or stabilizing) and peace-enforcing forces. And noted that there were potential problems with all the participant countries: Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia Jordan, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). She takes it as obvious that the soldiers on the ground in both forces would need to be fluent in Arabic. The primary language in Azerbaijan is Azerbaijan (aka Azeri), a Turkic language. Indonesians speak “several hundred languages” most of which “have an Austronesian base.” (8) That could be quite a challenge in itself!
She also noted that that Netanyahu became highly unpopular during the first six months of the war, but his popularity rebounded considerably beginning in April of 2024. Scheindlin also argues that serious reconstruction in Gaza can’t really begin for at least a year.
In a column last week, Scheindlin also notes that Netanyahu’s allies are trying to shift blame for the war onto the pro-democracy advocates who has been fighting his efforts to turn Israel into a more authoritarian country.
[Netanyahu’s] chummiest correspondent in Israeli news, Amit Segal, delivered a monologue on Monday explicitly calling to investigate the pro-democracy protesters and the media. Netanyahu himself was busy giving a combative, defiant and triumph-filled opening speech at the Knesset on Monday. But the real action that day was behind the scenes, where Netanyahu reportedly held consultations about rushing a law to establish [a] government-friendly commission of inquiry [into responsibility for insufficient preparedness for the October 7, 2023 attack.]. His primary aim, reported Ynet, is to engineer a commission that will investigate the role of the courts and the protests. (9)
Jared Kushner also has plans for Gaza, of course. Joshua Leifer reports on a speech Kushner made at during the opening ceremony of the new CENTCOM base:
[In] Kushner's vision for the future, it seems, the Gaza Strip would remain divided, not just territorially but also administratively, into two areas: one behind the "yellow line," under full Israeli control; the other, effectively under Hamas control, which comprises to less than half the territory of the Strip. That would amount to something like the West-Bank-ification of Gaza – a scenario that has become dangerously more likely since the cease-fire went into effect.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the cease-fire talks' Arab mediators have become increasingly worried that the division of Gaza floated by Kushner would not be merely a stop-gap measure between phases of the agreement but could become a permanent partition of the devastated coastal enclave.
It is easy to see how this might happen. The temporary, interim stage of the agreement becomes permanent reality [in this scenario], while a final status-agreement is indefinitely deferred, ostensibly because consensus about the subsequent stage of negotiations cannot be reached. Israel remains the occupying force in most of Gaza, while aid groups and the vaunted international consortium manage civilian infrastructure and reconstruction efforts under the watch of Israeli guns. [my emphasis] (10)
I just had a reminder of the possibilities and perils of the evolving media
environment.
I often quote the leading “realist” foreign policy scholar John Mearsheimer here, usually at least once a week.
Just in the last few days, I noticed two new YouTube channels featuring Mearsheimer: “Mearsheimer Lens” and “Mearsheimer Realism.” Both appear to be technically well-done AI productions. The former describes itself as follows:
The Mearsheimer Lens is a fan-made channel dedicated to exploring global politics through the lens of Professor John J. Mearsheimer’s realist perspective. We are not affiliated with or representing Professor Mearsheimer in any official capacity — this channel simply aims to discuss and interpret his ideas on international relations, power politics, and world order.
… Inspired by John J. Mearsheimer - not speaking for him. (1)
But as of this writing, it doesn’t say the images and sound it shows are AI-generated or excerpts culled from other interviews. Today I listened to a very recent one about Venezuela, which included AI-Mearsheimer talking about how he thinks Venezuela’s cooperation with Russia and Iran fits into his “offensive realist” foreign policy view. And it sounded pretty good, and pretty Mearsheimer-ish.
But I checked again to see if I could find any other additional information on the source. There’s the description quoted above that disavows any claim of “speaking for” him and so forth. “Mearsheimer Realism” has been online only since earlier this month. “The Mearsheimer Lens” has been around since 2015 but I haven’t noticed it until recently. (AI’s capabilities in 2015 weren’t anything like they are today in creating credible digital clones of people.)
One thing that seemed unusual in the Venezuela-related video is that AI-Mearsheimer is speaking directly to the camera at length, with a backdrop that appears in many of his legit interviews. (Or at least a lot like it.) He typically sits for interviews with a live interviewer – a with various different kinds of interviews, from grumpy conservative isolationists to Global South lefties. He seems to find that format to be a good one for him, and he seems to appreciate probing questions.
I’ve also seen videos of him giving lectures, where he talks at some length on his own. But AI-Mearsheimer speaking on his own sounded mostly like the real one does when he is responding to interview questions and not so much like he was giving a lecture. He also seemed more repetitive than real-Mearsheimer normally is. And several times, the pronounced words ending in “-tion” with a bit of a Spanish-language accent, which I’ve never noticed with real-Mearsheimer.
I also did come across a website (that I had never heard of before) called Jammerjoh that claimed that “Mearsheimer Lens” was using an AI-Mearsheimer.
Evolving technologies don’t go “back into the box.” AI has been around for a while -
But consumers of its output also have to adapt.
So do regulators. I was able to piece together the above because I’ve been a geeky blogger since 2003 and I’ve always tried to be careful about sourcing. I really like the footnoting capability of Substack, not least because back in the early days of blogging, it was common to use hyperlinks for sources. For a while, I even saw people criticize bloggers from quoting text from another blog but without including the hyperlinks from the original in the quote.
One problem then was that hyperlinks were not nearly as stable as they are now. I remember once spending at least an hour, maybe more, trying to track down a New York Times article I had quoted in a previous post just a few days before, because the hyperlink I had used had already died. So I started early on showing the titles of articles and the sources including a hyperlink for the title.
Between that and my academic training, I try to vet my sources carefully.
Back in the days when there were only three major TV networks in the US, only a few newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post could be considered national and/or international papers. And they actually were, you know, on paper. There were national monthly and weekly magazines. Time, Newsweek, and the stodgily conservative U.S. News and World Report were the three dominant ones in the US. And you had to get them from either newsstands (there are still some of those with a kind of nostalgic charm now), by mail subscription, or at a library.
And the only people then who had phones they could hold in the palms of their hands were characters on Star Trek.
So then, it was a bit easier to know where to go to do reality-checks on particular factual claims from current news reports. Not so easy to get to them, maybe, but a more limited number of places to go to look. This had its downsides, too. The famous book by Edward Herman und Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, about how governments and economic elites could massively influence public opinion even through the independent major media outlets at the time, was first published in 1988. Before everybody had an e-mail account. A The year before Quantum Computer Services changed its name to America Online.
But this doesn’t mean that governments can’t establish reasonable regulations for digital media. For instance, a portal like YouTube could require users who post videos to clearly and prominently state who AI is being used in the video, particularly when they are using the names and images of real people in the AI simulation.
One of my longtime Facebook friends who seems to be a bit, uh, uncritical about Trumpista claims, did a post there welcoming people to disagree with what she says. This is a somewhat edited version of what I posted in response.
I would say these days that we all have to keep in mind that misinformation and “alternative facts” are more easily accessible than ever. But exchanging opinions about claims that are badly reported and/or disconnected from reality isn’t especially meaningful.
For instance, Trump has recently been claiming he has secured commitments of 15 or maybe 17 trillion dollars in new investments in the US. I’ve heard that reported and have seen from at least two legitimate news sites video of Trump making the claims. So it was not an AI fake or something. And I’ve heard one or two usually-careful commentators dismissing the number as frivolous because the amount would be half or more of US GDP. I at least looked up what the current US GDP estimate is, which is between 29 and 30 trillion dollars. So the amounts he stated would be half or more of the GDP. And to me the claim seems extravagantly absurd.
Now, if I were going to do further fact-checking, I would look for some kind of official list of those expected investments via the White House website or maybe Truth Social. I would want to know what the timelines on the investments would be: One year? Five years? Ten years? And I would want to see what kind of investments they are: New factories built? Foreign companies planning to expand their retail facilities in the US? Money expected to be invested in US private equity funds or stocks in American companies? Additional income from tariffs? I assume that most economists would see those latter two as not being all “hard” investments. And actually, tariff income isn’t investment at all, it is income to the federal government – something Trump himself seems genuinely not to understand – and some of that theoretically could go into government spending that would generate more investment.
I would also ask how firm and specific these investment commitments are. Are they signed contracts? Explicit trade agreements? Serious projections? Informal pronouncements?
But if facts are irrelevant, then the only exchange that can happen would be exchanging slogans. And it’s also true (based on decades of polling data) that a big part of Trump’s voting base are fundamentalist Christians, most of whom are very familiar with the bumper sticker showing a Bible and the slogan, “God said it, I believe it, and that’s all there is to it.” In that mode of thinking and believing, facts really don’t matter, only which side someone picks.
Here's a version from Derric Johnson’s Vocal Orchestra, which has a certain amount of dorky whitebread charm. Complete with quotations from the King James’ Bible. (1)
The Telegraph recently posted this audio podcast in which Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group talks about the recent history of US-Venezuela relations and the Trump Administration drone murders against Venezuela and the increasing US threats of war and subversion against the current government. (1)
When American policymakers look at Venezuela, it’s a very safe assumption that the main background for their thinking is that Venezuela has the largest known crude oil reserves of any country in the world.
But foreign policy can come from a mixed set of elements: greed; geopolitical power-balancing; ideology; war lust; misguided good intentions; delusions; blundering stupidity. With Venezuela, oil is always a big part of the mix in the heads of US policymakers.
Democracy Now! recently addressed the question of how much of a role Marco Rubio’s far-right, old-fashioned anti-Communist ideology may be playing in the current situation. Although how to reasonably categorize Venezuela on a left-to-right political spectrum is a messy question. For Peace President Trump’s cult, the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is some kind of commie. And he is holding lots of oil. (2)
For what it’s worth alongside Venezuela’s massive oil reserves, the V-Dem democracy ratings for 2024 classify Venezuela as an “electoral autocracy,” a category that also includes El Salvador (one of Trump’s favorite allies), Egypt, India, Pakistan, Russia, and Ukraine, among others. (3) So Rubio and the neocons would have at least a figleaf of a pro-democracy claim in attempting a regime-change war.
Given the regime-change talk, it’s worth remembering that even angry opposition politicians and activists can have patriotic restraints about calling for the US to invade and forcibly overthrow their country’s government:
Trump’s belligerence toward Venezuela - military actions off its coast, demonization of Venezuelan immigrants and their mass deportation, and the stiffening of sanctions - has deepened polarization in an unexpected quarter: the Venezuelan opposition. Until the July 2024 presidential election, the opposition’s leading parties had rallied behind María Corina Machado and her chosen candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia. Today, that unity has fractured, and much of the division can be traced to Trump’s Venezuela policy.
The situation mirrors the Trump-provoked polarization in the United States, which is not just left versus right but pits Democrats and Republicans against one another with unprecedented fervor. In Venezuela, one bloc of the opposition consists of leaders who, from the outset, have been vehemently anti-Hugo Chávez and anti-Nicolás Maduro, but are now distancing themselves from Washington. They find themselves at odds with the pro-Washington bloc, aligned with Trump on everything from immigration to regime change by any means possible.
Machado’s recent Nobel Peace Prize win sharpens the rift. The intensity of the opposition’s division starkly contradicts the Nobel Committee’s claim that Machado is a “key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided.” [my emphasis] (4)
Plus, the US record on regime-change operations is remarkably messy and ugly. But neocons like Rubio don’t let that worry them much, because they seem to stay perpetually high on their own ideological stash.
The nominal justification of the war, that the Venezuelan President is the head of a drug cartel, is preposterously phony: “U.S. intelligence has assessed that little to none of the fentanyl trafficked to the United States is being produced in Venezuela, despite recent claims from the Trump administration, a senior U.S. official directly familiar with the matter tells Drop Site.” (5)
Kyle Kulinski (whose style may be a bit raw for some) reports on the Drop Site report and adds useful background on Trump’s hostility to Venezuela and his fondness for Veneuelan oil. (6)
The Trump regime’s justification for murdering people in fishing boats and for regime-change operations against the Maduro government is painfully preposterous:
The official narrative is a fabrication. The existence of a Venezuelan government-run “Cartel de los Soles”, let alone its control of the transnational cocaine trade from Venezuela, has been largely debunked. And while “Tren de Aragua” is a real criminal organization with a transnational presence, it lacks the capacity to operate in the ways suggested by the United States; it certainly pales in comparison to the power of cartels in Colombia, Mexico, or Ecuador.
Tellingly, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration’s National Drug Threat Assessment of 2024 does not even mention Venezuela. And a classified National Intelligence Council report established that Maduro did not control any drug trafficking organisation. (7)
Guillame Long continues with a description of the challenge of the US invading and taking over Venezuela, Iraq-style:
There is no understating the extent of the asymmetry of a potential war between the United States and Venezuela, nor the US capacity to easily overwhelm Venezuela’s conventional forces. But it would be mistaken to think an invasion of Venezuela would be a replay of Panama in 1989–1990 or Haiti in 1994, the last occasions the US occupied countries in its hemisphere. The 20th and 21st centuries were, of course, marred by constant overt and covert US meddling in the national politics of South American states. But unlike Central America and the Caribbean, where smaller and less powerful states became the testing ground for the rise of the US Marine Corps, Washington has never carried out an outright military intervention on the South American landmass. Venezuela, with about 28 million inhabitants, has roughly the same population as Iraq had in 2003 and more than 10 times that of Panama in 1990.
Trump 2.0 is deliberately blurring of the lines between counter-terrorism and anti-narcotics operations. But that process has also been in progress for a while. The Intercept describes a 2015 report from “the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses” that shows antecdents for the murdering-fishermen policy of Trump 2.0 :
The report, which was obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request and has never previously been made public, provides a window into the inner workings of major drug-trafficking networks. The report also shows the central role the Pentagon sees for itself in countering those networks at a time when the Trump administration is claiming broad war-making authorities and beginning to openly use the military to assassinate alleged smugglers.
An attorney whose client was interviewed by researchers working for the Pentagon told The Intercept that the report proves that the recent sidelining of counternarcotics police in favor of bloodshed at sea is what military insiders have wanted for years.
“There’s a huge difference between the Coast Guard or the Navy boarding what they suspect to be a boat with drugs coming into the United States, and prosecuting those people, and those people having lawyers and facing charges and appearing in court, and potentially going to prison if they’re convicted — and the summary execution of suspected drug dealers,” the lawyer said. “And now we’ve crossed that line.” ...
The report shows glimmers of the mentality that Trump has made into policy with his tropical drone strikes, but the president has done little of what the Pentagon-funded researchers ultimately concluded would be the most effective means of taking on cartels: fighting corruption and arresting drug lords. [my emphasis] (8)
The Obama Administration’s usage of assassination (aka, “targeted strikes”) as a routine foreign policy tool (9) also helped legitimate the policy we know see in the snuff video’s the Trump regime releases showing their murders of people in fishing boats.
O.M.G.! Victor Davis Hanson, aka, Dick Cheney’s favorite historian, is still around talking smack on YouTube. (1) In this instance with Niall Ferguson, one of the champion neocon propagandists. If they had included Tom Friedman - or, as Digby Parton called him, Little Tommy Friedman, age 6 - it would have been a trifecta of frivolity. But the third person here is Stephen Kotkin, who is a Hoover Institution guy along with Hanson and Ferguson, but he is actually a substantial historian who’s worth listening to.
Which is not to say I find the relentlessly hawkish view on China that Kotkin takes in the first half of the discussion. (He’s a Hoover Institute guy, after all.)
Trigger warning: listening to Victor Davis Hanson can induce a feeling that your skin is crawling.
Also, good Lord, I had forgotten what a hack VDH is!
Notes:
(1) Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson and Stephen Kotkin: Three Historians Debate The Era of Trump. Hoover Institution YouTube channel 10/14/2025. <https://youtu.be/v1Gm1OR2SPg?si=ULTKkp5XQosoVMV8> (Accessed: 2025-29-10).
I find the definition of populism promoted by the political philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe very useful. They defined populism is a method of doing politics which frames an opposition between The People and The Elite, the large majority against a self-interested small group with bad policies.
That definition is a sparse one. It allows for the reality that a populist political style can be right or left in its political aims. Or a mixture of both. It also avoids the careless journalistic habit of using populism as a synonym for demagoguery or even for politicians adopting a folksy vocabulary.
Michael Butter, a German analyst of conspiracy theories, uses an interesting approach in his new book, The Alarmed: What Conspiracy Theories Wreak (1), using the word “alarmed” to reference both how conspiracy theories can make adherent alarmed, and also to how many people are alarmed by the popularity of conspiracy theories and the harm they can do. He uses a definition of populist similar to the Laclau-Mouffe approach. He also puts it in the context of distinguishing between “thick” and “thin” ideologies, following a concept of the political scientist Michael Freeden.
"Conspiracy-ism" (Konspirationismus) is ... compatible with the English-language research discourse, in which "conspiracism" has long been used loosely to capture a more general tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. However, conspiracies, like populism, for which this understanding is already firmly established in research, is a "thin" ideology in the sense of the political scientist Michael Freeden. While "fat" ideologies such as fascism or socialism make a whole range of and usually quite detailed assumptions about how the world works, thin ideologies … are far more rudimentary. They therefore never occur in isolation, but always in combination with one or more strong ideologies.
In other words, conspiracy theories have to been understood in the larger framework he describes in this table.
These kinds of differentiations are helpful in sorting out what conspiracy theories are and how they work. A task that can obviously be confusing. But his schema does help us avoid assuming automatically that conspiracist thinking is associated particularly with rightwing politics.
Grappling with conspiracy theories
Butter also cites research showing that people who have some contact with conspiracy theories can become more open to paying attention to conspiracy theories. Which is not good or bad in itself. It all depends on how well people apply actual critical thinking to what they encounter. Having the kind of overview he provides about the levels of conceptualization involved is useful in sorting out the accuracy and practical implications of such conspiracy thinking.
One example he cites as a conspiracy theory is an American example, the pre-Civil War notion of the “Slave Power” that abolitionists came to use commonly to describe efforts by Southern slaveowners and politicians – two overlapping groups, by the way – to continually expand slave territory, a process that ultimately led to the Civil War. An 1862 book by Irish economist John Elliott Cairnes, The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, and Probable Designs – which the author dedicated to the liberal democratic philosopher John Stuart Mill – used that framework to describe the history of slavery and the outbreak of the Civil War.
There were actual secret conspiracies involved, notably the behind-the-scenes collaboration of John C. Calhoun - aka, the Evil Spirit of American history – with the legislature of his home state of South Carolina in the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33 – against the Andrew Jackson Administration in which Calhoun was Vice President. But the “Slave Power” was mostly understood as a powerful political movement which acted against the best interests of American democracy.
Henry Wilson, who was the Republican Vice President from 1873-1875, produced a three-volume history of the slavery issue in the US titled History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–77).
Butter writes:
A famous example of a conspiracy theory from American history that distorts the actual situation is the so-called "slave power" conspiracy theory, which gained great effectiveness in the 1985s. The future President Abraham Lincoln and other members of the Republican Party accused the most influential proponents of slavery, a group called the Slave Power, of pushing a secret plan to extend the system of slavery to the entire United States and to enslave the white working class as well. In fact, the Slave Power defended slavery and tried to introduce it in the newly formed states by lobbying and helping sympathetic candidates into political office. However, it was not a conspiracy. [my emphasis] (p. 51)
Actually, critics of slavery viewed the Slave Power in much the way Butter describes it in that last sentence. The plans of the slaveowners and their allied politicians were not pushing a ultra-secret plot. They were doing their advocacy out in the open. (2)
But Butter uses the “Slave Power” concept as an example of a conspiracy theory that was actually pro-democracy as an illustration of how political conspiracy theories can be used in support of liberal-left ends.
A better example of a US political movement that trafficked in actual conspiracy theories in the early half of the 19th century would be the Anti-Masonic Party, which viewed the Freemasons as something like the Elders of Zion in the later, much more fanatical conspiracist theory.
Notes:
(1) Butter, Michael (2025): Die Alarmierten.Was Versicherungstheorien anrichten. Berlin Suhrkamp. My translations to English here.
(2) Michael William Pfatt makes the argument that the Slave Power rhetoric by abolitionists was a conspiracy theory in Political Style of Conspiracy-Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln (2005). East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
